Abigail Barr

Costly punishment across human societies.

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain.

Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment

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.

More ‘altruistic’ punishment in larger societies

If individuals will cooperate with cooperators, and punish non-cooperators even at a cost to themselves, then this strong reciprocity could minimize the cheating that undermines cooperation. Based upon numerous economic experiments, some have proposed that human cooperation is explained by strong reciprocity and norm enforcement. Second-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on you; third-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on someone else. Third-party punishment is an effective way to enforce the norms of strong reciprocity and promote cooperation. Here we present new results that expand on a previous report from a large cross-cultural project. This project has already shown that there is considerable cross-cultural variation in punishment and cooperation. Here we test the hypothesis that population size (and complexity) predicts the level of third-party punishment. Our results show that people in larger, more complex societies engage in significantly more third-party punishment than people in small-scale societies.

Risk Sharing, Commitment and Information: An experimental analysis

This paper describes and analyzes the results of a unique field experiment especially designed to test the effects of the level of commitment and information available to individuals when sharing risk. We find that limiting exogenously provided commitment is associated with less risk sharing, while limiting information on defections can be associated with more risk sharing. These results can be understood by distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic incentives, and by recognizing that social sanctions are costly to inflict or that individuals suffer from time-inconsistent preferences. Comparing the groups formed within our experiment with the real life risk sharing networks in a few villages allows us to test the external validity of our experiment and suggests that the results are salient to our understanding of risk sharing arrangements observed in developing countries.

A client-community assessment of the NGO sector in Uganda

Abstract Using original data from client-community assessments, we examine motivations in the Ugandan NGO sector. In general, client-community satisfaction with NGO interventions is high, even though some NGO staff are viewed as unresponsive, underskilled, or self-serving. We find evidence that NGOs endeavour to redress the balance between rich and poor, although more remote communities suffer neglect, possibly for cost reasons. NGOs are less inclined to maintain a permanent presence in more remote and poorer client-communities, which impacts negatively on their assessment scores. We also find evidence that NGOs too often operate in the same location, resulting in some duplication of effort. Finally, results indicate that community participation enhances satisfaction.

Revealed Preference and Self-Insurance: Can We Learn from the Self-Employed in Chile?

Financial sector development is a critical area of effective social protection policy. A well-regulated financial sector can complement government efforts to keep households from falling into poverty - by supplying the instruments needed to pool risks, or to self-insure against losses because of the death, or disability of a household member, unexpected loss of employment, or inability to work in old age. But many of the policy recommendations that can be drawn from the social risk management framework, rest on the strong assumption that risk, and time preferences are uniform across individuals, or households. Policies meant to encourage participation in public pension systems, and to reduce evasion where such systems are mandatory (by more closely aligning benefits with payroll contributions, or introducing individual retirement accounts) implicitly attempt to emulate the savings behavior of individuals, and households faced with fully functioning capital markets, and perfect information. If no allowance is made for variation in preferences, however, the welfare effects of policy reforms will vary across the target population. Mandated social security, even if actuarially fair for most, is likely to impose welfare losses on those less inclined to save, and insure. That said, a clearer picture of individual and household preferences, and how they vary across the population, can help governments design social security systems that complement private savings, and insurance instruments. The authors present the results of a field experiment, designed to produce an empirical measure of risk aversion, and time preferences of selected groups in Chile, which in 1981 pioneered social security reform with a transition to individual retirement accounts. The experiment was designed primarily to establish whether the time, and risk preferences of the self-employed differ significantly from those of wage, and salaried workers. They find no significant differences in mean risk, and time preferences between the self-employed, and employees, or between the contributing, and non-contributing employees. But they find significant differences in these preferences between the contributing, and non-contributing self-employed. Among the self-employed, those who are more patient choose to contribute to the pension system. However, the contributing self-employed are significantly more tolerant of risk than the non-contributing self-employed, a finding that conflicts with the assumption that the formal pension system is the only source of insurance against poverty in old age. The Chilean pension system may be viewed with some trepidation by its pool of potential clients. Since risk aversion declines with education, the participation of the economically active who are free to choose, could be enhanced by a campaign carefully designed to raise awareness, allay fears, and inform people of the benefits of saving for retirement in the formal pension system.

Culture does account for variation in game behavior

Lamba and Maces critique (1) of our research (2–4) is based on incorrect claims about our experiments and several misunderstandings of the theory underpinning our efforts. Their findings are consistent with our previous work and lead to no unique conclusions.

Who Shares Risk with Whom under Different Enforcement Mechanisms

We investigate whether available enforcement mechanisms affect who shares risk with whom in sub-Saharan Africa, by applying dyadic regression analysis to data from a lab-type experiment, surveys, and a genealogical-mapping exercise. During the experiment, participants were invited to form risk-sharing groups under three enforcement mechanisms: external, intrinsic, and extrinsic (i.e., social sanctioning). Same-sex dyads and dyads who belong to the same economic community-based organizations (CBOs) are more likely to share risk. However, when social sanctioning is possible, comembers in economic CBOs withdraw from group formation and coreligion, and marriage ties come to the fore.

Ethnicity and Wage Determination in Ghana

This paper looks at earnings differentials between (1) members of different ethnic groups and (2) employers’ relatives, unrelated co-ethnics, and other workers, in the Ghanaian manufacturing sector. We find that a significant proportion of the identified earnings differentials between ethnic groups can be explained with reference to a fairly standard set of observed workers’ characteristics. Labour market segregation along ethnic lines combined with considerable variation in employer characteristics (possibly due to discrimination in other markets) accounts for most of the remaining differentials. There is no evidence of statistical discrimination between ethnic groups, although there is evidence of such discrimination in favour of inexperienced co-ethnic workers, who can be more easily assessed and matched to jobs than similar workers from other ethnic groups. Finally, workers who are related to their employers earn a considerable premium, possibly because they contribute more than their fellow workers to productivity.

Models of decision-making and the coevolution of social preferences

We would like to thank the commentators for their generous comments, valuable insights and helpful suggestions. We begin this response by discussing the selfishness axiom and the importance of the preferences, beliefs, and constraints framework as a way of modeling some of the proximate influences on human behavior. Next, we broaden the discussion to ultimate-level (that is evolutionary) explanations, where we review and clarify gene-culture coevolutionary theory, and then tackle the possibility that evolutionary approaches that exclude culture might be sufficient to explain the data. Finally, we consider various methodological and epistemological concerns expressed by our commentators.