2010 MarketsReligionCommSize

Subject Headings: Behavioral Economics, Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Third-Party Punishment Game.

Notes

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.

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2010 MarketsReligionCommSize	Joseph Henrich Jean Ensminger Richard McElreath Abigail Barr Clark Barrett Alexander Bolyanatz Juan Camilo Cardenas Michael Gurven Edwins Gwako Natalie Henrich Carolyn Lesorogol Frank Marlowe David Tracer John Ziker			Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment			http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Henrich et. al. 2010.pdf	10.1126/science.1182238