“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life

Evolutionary Game Theory

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Cooperation, Norms, and Revolutions: A Unified Game-Theoretical Approach

Cooperation is of utmost importance to society as a whole, but is often challenged by individual self-interests. While game theory has studied this problem extensively, there is little work on interactions within and across groups with different preferences or beliefs. Yet, people from different social or cultural backgrounds often meet and interact. This can yield conflict, since behavior that is considered cooperative by one population might be perceived as non-cooperative from the viewpoint of another. To understand the dynamics and outcome of the competitive interactions within and between groups, we study game-dynamical replicator equations for multiple populations with incompatible interests and different power (be this due to different population sizes, material resources, social capital, or other factors). These equations allow us to address various important questions: For example, can cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma be promoted, when two interacting groups have different preferences? Under what conditions can costly punishment, or other mechanisms, foster the evolution of norms? When does cooperation fail, leading to antagonistic behavior, conflict, or even revolutions? And what incentives are needed to reach peaceful agreements between groups with conflicting interests? Our detailed quantitative analysis reveals a large variety of interesting results, which are relevant for society, law and economics, and have implications for the evolution of language and culture as well

Kinship, lineage identity, and an evolutionary perspective on the structure of cooperative big game hunting groups in Indonesia.

Work was conducted among traditional, subsistence whale hunters in Lamalera, Indonesia in order to test if kinship or lineage membership is more important for explaining the organization of cooperative hunting parties ranging in size from 8-14 men. Crew identifications were collected for all 853 hunts that occurred between May 3 and August 5, 1999. Lineage identity and genetic relatedness were determined for a sample of 189 hunters. Results of matrix regression show that kinship explains little of the hunters' affiliations independent of lineage identity. Crews are much more related amongst themselves than expected by chance. This is due, however, to the correlation between lineage membership and kinship. Lineage members are much more likely to affiliate in crews, but beyond r = 0.5 kin are just as likely not to affiliate. The results are discussed vis-à-vis the evolution of cooperation and group identity

Does game theory work? The bargaining challenge

Book description: This volume brings together all of Ken Binmore's influential experimental papers on bargaining along with newly written commentary in which Binmore discusses the underlying game theory and addresses the criticism leveled at it by behavioral economists. When Binmore began his experimental work in the 1980s, conventional wisdom held that game theory would not work in the laboratory, but Binmore and other pioneers established that game theory can often predict the behavior of experienced players very well in favorable laboratory settings. The case of human bargaining behavior is particularly challenging for game theory. Everyone agrees that human behavior in real-life bargaining situations is governed at least partly by considerations of fairness, but what happens in a laboratory when such fairness considerations supposedly conflict with game-theoretic predictions? Behavioral economists, who emphasize the importance of other-regarding or social preferences, sometimes argue that their findings threaten traditional game theory. Binmore disputes both their interpretations of their findings and their claims about what game theorists think it reasonable to predict. Binmore's findings from two decades of game theory experiments have made a lasting contribution to economics. These papers—some coauthored with other leading economists, including Larry Samuelson, Avner Shaked, and John Sutton—show that game theory does indeed work in favorable laboratory environments, even in the challenging case of bargaining

Emergence of communities and diversity in social networks

Communities are common in complex networks and play a significant role in the functioning of social, biological, economic, and technological systems. Despite widespread interest in detecting community structures in complex networks and exploring the effect of communities on collective dynamics, a deep understanding of the emergence and prevalence of communities in social networks is still lacking. Addressing this fundamental problem is of paramount importance in understanding, predicting, and controlling a variety of collective behaviors in society. An elusive question is how communities with common internal properties arise in social networks with great individual diversity. Here, we answer this question using the ultimatum game, which has been a paradigm for characterizing altruism and fairness. We experimentally show that stable local communities with different internal agreements emerge spontaneously and induce social diversity into networks, which is in sharp contrast to populations with random interactions. Diverse communities and social norms come from the interaction between responders with inherent heterogeneous demands and rational proposers via local connections, where the former eventually become the community leaders. This result indicates that networks are significant in the emergence and stabilization of communities and social diversity. Our experimental results also provide valuable information about strategies for developing network models and theories of evolutionary games and social dynamics.This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grants 61573064, 71631002, 71401037, and 11301032; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Beijing Nova Programme; and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Individual Discovery Grant). The Boston University work was supported by NSF Grants PHY-1505000, CMMI-1125290, and CHE- 1213217, and by Defense Threat Reduction Agency Grant HDTRA1-14-1-0017, and Department of Energy Contract DE-AC07-05Id14517. (61573064 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 71631002 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 71401037 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 11301032 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Beijing Nova Programme; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Individual Discovery Grant); PHY-1505000 - NSF; CMMI-1125290 - NSF; CHE-1213217 - NSF; HDTRA1-14-1-0017 - Defense Threat Reduction Agency; DE-AC07-05Id14517 - Department of Energy)Published versio

The Evolution of Social Contracts

Influential thinkers such as Young, Sugden, Binmore, and Skyrms have developed game-theoretic accounts of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. Social contracts are sets of commonly understood rules that govern cooperative social interaction within societies. These naturalistic accounts provide us with valuable and important insights into the foundations of human societies. However, current naturalistic theories focus mainly on how social contracts solve coordination problems in which the interests of the individual participants are aligned, not competition problems in which individual interests compete with group interests. In response, I set out to build on those theories and provide a comprehensive naturalistic account of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. My central claim is that social contracts have culturally evolved to solve cooperation problems, which include both coordination and competition problems. I argue that solutions to coordination problems emerge from “within-group” dynamics, while solutions to competition problems result largely from “between-group” dynamics