by Jeroen Bouterse
Here’s an interesting game. You receive 20 dollars, and you and three others can anonymously contribute any portion of this amount to a public pool. The amount of money in this pool is then multiplied by 1.5 and divided equally among all players. Repeat 10 times, then go home with your money. What will happen? How much would you contribute in round one, if you knew nothing about your fellow players?
This ‘Public Goods Game’ is one example of the many sophisticated social-psychological experiments that Joseph Henrich brings into play in his recent book The WEIRDest people in the world. It is also a good example of how he puts those experiments to use. One lesson from this game is that people are more cooperative than models of economically rational behavior would suggest (are more homo reciprocans than homo economicus (211)). Another is that average first-round contributions vary significantly between populations. ‘WEIRD’ stands for ‘Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic’, and also serves to emphasize that WEIRD populations are weird in the sense of unusual: they are psychological outliers in a lot of ways.
To stay with the Public Goods Game: Henrich shows that the average share of their endowment that participants from a given country put into the pool in round one correlates negatively with how strongly kinship ties are in that country, as measured either by the so-called ‘Kinship Identity Index’ or by the prevalence of cousin marriage. This is not a surprise to Henrich, who sees the same pattern repeated in other negative correlations: between the strength of kinship ties and the number of blood donations for instance (221), and in general between the strength of kinship and “impersonal prosociality”: a cooperative attitude towards anonymous strangers. Read more »