Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment

By Joseph Henrich, Jean Ensminger, R. Mcelreath, A. Barr, Clark C. Barrett, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Juan-Camilo Cardenas, Michael Gurven, E. Gwako, Natalie Henrich and 4 more. Science, 2010

1,267 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A Fair Society Many of the social interactions of everyday life, especially those involving economic exchange, take place between individuals who are unrelated to each other and often do not know each other. Countless laboratory experiments have documented the propensity of subjects to behave fairly in these interactions and to punish those participants deemed to have behaved unfairly. Henrich et al. (p. 1480, see the Perspective by Hoff) measured fairness in thousands of individuals from 15 contemporary, small-scale societies to gain an understanding of the evolution of trustworthy exchange among human societies. Fairness was quantitated using three economic games. Various societal parameters, such as the extent to which food was purchased versus produced, were also collected. Institutions, as represented by markets, community size, and adherence to a world religion all predict a greater exercise of fairness in social exchange. The origins of modern social norms and behaviors may be found in the evolution of institutions. Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18ad4b40af08ea80464b7f426d72806320394703

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Citations in the corpus

Beyond WEIRD: Towards a broad-based behavioral science (2010, positive): “Community size positively predicts greater punishment (Henrich et al. 2010).”
Tastes, Castes, and Culture: The Influence of Society on Preferences (2011, neutral): “Take, for example, the study of Henrich et al. (2010), which shows that the preferences of individuals to be fair in anonymous transactions and to punish unfairness increase with the level of the society’s market integration, measured as households’ average percentage of calories that are purchased.”
Malthusian Reinforcement Learning (2018, background): “Or alternatively, larger social networks may provide more opportunities for recombination of disparate cultural elements that originated in farther and farther away contexts [4, 16, 21, 28].”
Understanding Relationship Marketing and Loyalty Program Effectiveness in Global Markets (2015, positive): “As societies develop and become more integrated in global markets, institutions and social norms evolve in ways that tend to increase overall security (Henrich et al. 2010).”
Field experiments across the social sciences (2017, background): “The researchers’ first finding, that the willingness to engage in both prosocial behavior (Henrich et al. 2001) and costly punishment (Henrich et al. 2006) holds universally across societies, generalized one of the major findings of earlier BGs beyond the standard sample of undergraduates.”
Why We Cooperate (2014, background): “…punishment behavior in PGG games (Ellingsen et al., 2012; Gächter & Herrmann, 2009; Herrmann et al., 2008); and across a ranges of societies from hunter-gatherers to industrialized nations, greater market integration was associated with greater generosity in economic games (Henrich et al., 2010).”
Stake size effects in ultimatum game and dictator game offers: A meta-analysis (2019, background): “Cross-cultural studies where stake sizes are equivalent in purchasing power Stake sizes appear to vary, but are only varied as a method to keep stake size equivalent across cultures by accounting for variation in purchasing power (Henrich et al., 2010) N/A”
Fair Is Not Fair Everywhere (2015, background): “On the other hand, research conducted outside of Western societies has demonstrated a great degree of cultural variation concerning distributive justice and suggests that some beliefs concerning fairness may be driven by socially acquired norms (Chudek & Henrich, 2011; Henrich et al., 2010).”
Religion, spirituality, and altruism (2013, background): “Cultural altruism, which is found in large and complex human societies, involves reciprocity between unrelated partners that can be reinforced by beliefs, symbols, moral gods, and norms of fairness of the world religions (Batson, 1983; Henrich et al., 2010; Roes & Raymond, 2003; Stark, 2001).”