
We Aren’t the World (2013) - tshepang
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazines/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/
======
Htsthbjig
The problem is that you can't compare $100 purchasing power in USA with $100
in a remote village in Peru.

Imagine that instead of $100, they give you $10.000 and things change. Would
you refuse $1.000 free money even if someone earns $9.000?. Hardly.

But this is exactly what is happening. With 1000 euros/month I live like a
king in some parts of South America,like Argentina, but I live badly in
Europe, the cost of living is way higher.

~~~
orting
So the idea that scientific studies should include people that are not upper
middle-class westerns, is wrong because of the purchasing power of $100?

There is a link to the published paper in the article[1]. I have only skimmed
it, but there are many different studies and findings. One I think is really
interesting is this:

"Research on IQ using analytical tools from behavioral genetics has long shown
that IQ is highly heritable, and not particularly influenced by shared family
environment (Dickens & Flynn 2001, Flynn 2007). However, recent work using
7‐year old twins drawn from a wide range of socioeconomic statuses, shows that
contributions of genetic variation and shared environment varies dramatically
from low to high SES children (Turkheimer et al. 2003). For high SES children,
where environmental variability is negligible, genetic differences account for
70‐80% of the variation, with shared environment contributing less than 10%.
For low SES children, where there is far more variability in environmental
contributions to intelligence, genetic differences account for 0‐10% of the
variance, with shared environment contributing about 60%. This raises the
specter that much of what we think we have learned from behavioral genetics
may be misleading, as the data are disproportionately influenced by WEIRD
people, and their children (Nisbett 2009)."

What they are arguing is that we have conducted science in a way where we have
consistently sampled from a specific sub-population and used the results to
generalise about the remaining sub-population. To me it sounds like they are
on to something that could change many of the "givens" that are "known to be
true". I recently saw a TED talk with Paul Johnson[2] where she discusses the
problem that the sex of subjects in medical trials is often ignored leading to
results that only holds for men or women.

[1]
[http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...](http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_johnson_his_and_hers_healthc...](https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_johnson_his_and_hers_healthcare)

~~~
vacri
Htsthbjig's point is that if the money doesn't mean much to you anyway, you're
more likely to be punishing because you're not losing much. But if it means a
lot to you, why punish a stranger when you're getting a significant amount of
free money.

To properly compare the cultural differences in the test, it would have to be
done with the same level of purchasing power. That's not really stated one way
or the other in the article. $100 goes a lot further in a developing country
than a developed country, so if they were using the same dollar amount (I
doubt they were), then it isn't a directly comparable study.

For example: Make it $10. The stranger gives me a 1:9 split in their favour.
Fuck 'em, I'm not going to lose any sleep over a dollar, and it's not worth my
time to even _collect_ the dollar. Now make it $10k. Hey, I could actually do
something nice with $1k, even if the other person is being 'unfair'. The
relative purchasing power of the money in the test is significant within
cultures, let alone across cultures.

~~~
orting
I have no problem with the question "Have they considered purchasing power". I
could also come up with a dozen possible issues they might not have taken into
consideration. But I would never argue that they havent considered them before
I actually checked. And even though it seems reasonable to say

"The relative purchasing power of the money in the test is significant within
cultures, let alone across cultures."

I am not convinced that is correct. A quote from the paper describing the
study [1] suggest that the amount of money is not crucial

"Indeed, in the UG, raising the stakes to quite high levels (e.g., three
months’ income) does not substantially alter the basic results. In fact, at
high stakes, proposers tend to offer a little more, and responders remain
willing to reject offers that represent small fractions of the pie (e.g., 20%)
even when the pie is large (e.g., $400 in the United States). Similarly, the
results do not appear to be due to a lack of familiarity with the experimental
context. Subjects often do not change their behavior in any systematic way
when they participate in several replications of the identical experiment."

The point of the article is that it is the norm to conduct studies where
participants are selected from the same non-representative sub-population, and
that this methodology is heavily biased. Rejecting this idea, because you find
a possible issue with one of the many studies it is based on, seems like a
really bad idea.

[1] "Economic man" in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15
small-scale societies
([http://authors.library.caltech.edu/2278/1/HENbbs05.pdf](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/2278/1/HENbbs05.pdf))

~~~
vacri
20% of $400 is still not all that much unless you're in abject poverty. For a
minimum-wage worker in the US, it's a little over a day's work, but for anyone
else, it's vanishingly smaller. For a person on a _median_ income (around
$27.5k in the US), it's only several hours work. For a higher-level
professional, it's not even an hour's work. $80 doesn't buy you a lot of
professional time.

$400 certainly isn't three months income in the US (~$6900/qtr is the median),
as suggested earlier in the paragraph, let alone the 20% split of that.

------
tokenadult
Partly because this item has two alternate titles, it has been submitted lots
of times before (sometimes without many comments) without people noticing the
duplicate submissions. One of the earliest submissions (430 days ago)[1] had
well over 100 comments. My comment at the time linked to the full paper[2] by
the original authors, which was one of many papers I discussed with professors
of psychology (most of whom do their research in the framework of behavioral
genetics)[3] that school year in the journal club I attend at my alma mater
university.

Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly
undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea, and there are
now increasing efforts to broaden the samples of human beings used to
investigate general human characteristics. Cross-cultural validation was
considered very important in studies of personality psychology even before
this paper was published,[4] for example.

Anyway, this perspective comes easily for me, as an American who has lived in
a non-Western country for six years of my life (with knowledge of the
language, the classical literature, and the traditional culture). Definitely
the United States is not the center of the Universe. The study authors
referred to people from Western cultures, who were Educated, and who live in
Industrialized, Rich, Democracies as "WEIRD" people, and of course that
acronym marks out a minority of the world population. I am part of that
minority, but I have seen how non-Western, (then) less educated people lived
as their country made a transition from being agricultural, poor, and
dictatorial to being industrialized, rich, and democratic, and along the way
the local culture changed as local conditions changed.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282343)

[2] Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in
the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

[http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...](http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf)

[3]
[http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/](http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/)

[4]
[http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=103...](http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=orpc)

~~~
chillingeffect
> Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe.

Yes, this became especially clear to me personally while working in Asia
during the Second Gulf War. In the U.S., people (mainly hand-wringing liberals
like my circle it must be said) shrilly intoned "What is the rest of the world
going to think of us?!"

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, _they simply weren 't thinking about us._ Yes, we came
up in the news sometimes, with respect to specific political issues. However,
that invasion ("war") on the whole had no direct bearing on Taiwan.

What's weird about American culture includes how convinced we are that
everyone is looking at us as if we were the sun and the rest of them planets.
I'm convinced it's leftover pride from the so-called world wars and it's been
vented as a means of social control for the industrial military complex.
("We're the cops of the world, boys.")

It also includes the fact that we go around the world measuring everyone else.
When was the last time a bushman from New Guinea wandered into your office
park and administered a psychological test to you and your co-workers?

Going deeper, what's truly unusual about us is that we expect to discover or
create a system that explains everyone else. E.g. we expect to find atomic-
level principles that direct the behavior of every other culture out there as
if our investigations into natural science should be a template for social
values the world over.

~~~
poulsbohemian
While I don't disagree with your conclusions, my own personal experiences
abroad were quite different. When I was a student in Germany, US news showed
up on the nightly news and in the newspaper every day. I was regularly engaged
in debate about US politics by neighbors - most of whom were better informed
than the average American.

------
chippy
Let's discuss the implications for our field, technology.

It appears to me that it's calling out the particular pitfalls of the Silicon
Valley mindset being rubber stamped on the rest of the world in terms of
design and engineering. But this isn't that new - it's been commented upon
before at length (e.g. logical optimistic young engineer's view of the society
via building a social network).

But it's probably wider than this. I think it's actually speaking out how we
collect samples, data. We expect that 10000 people in one area to think the
same as 10000 people in another area, even if they are in the same
administrative country and the same geodeomographic characteristics. What
matters for some behaviour is culture. Games and experiments could be looked
at culturally rather than just geographically.

What should we take home for this? I think probably two things, that we are
different from the rest of the world, and that the world has variation within
it. To take this into account could be a new form of responsiveness.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
But isn't tech is a change agent in itself? Most tech by it's very nature
emphasizes the individual by making them less dependent on their immediate
social context. This applies to everything from the internet to the washing
machine.

Basically, most technology stimulates people to think and act more like
Westerners.

Also, taking this into account is raising the bar very high for SV, where most
companies already have problems recognizing the minor differences between them
and fellow Westerners.

I'm still waiting for the first major American service to understand the
differences between language, nationality and geography...

~~~
prawks
I wonder how strong of a connection the emphasis on "the individual" has with
the decreased anonymity in such technology.

It seems that platforms like 4chan provide the capability for more of a
"group-think" than platforms like Facebook, even though platforms like
Facebook propose that they assist in connecting large swaths of diverse
people.

------
_red
The answer mostly appears in the setup:

>The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in
_single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of
extended families_.

Their living situation is one where they are all essentially family. There
would be big social impacts on costing your family money, because of some
perceived issue with an unequal split.

They are likely all going to spend 'together' anyway. They are probably
bewildered why this weird foreigner doesn't grasp this basic fact, and is
forcing them to go through some bizarre ceremony to get the money.

~~~
ZoFreX
The answer to what? The first 1/4 of the article?

The thrust of the article is not "this one tribe is an anomaly in how we think
and judge", but rather "it turns out that the biggest anomaly is the people in
the USA". Up until now the model formed from looking at 'Westerners' has been
assumed to be 'the norm' or even how we are physically wired, and
unchangeable. Any observed deviations from the model are anomalies and
interesting. The novelty here is that actually, things may be the other way
around.

~~~
_red
I think you missed what my point was. They are all family.

Most such experiments carried out in 'the west' are done with strangers. This
is a non-trivial difference.

Go to the Ozark mountains in Arkansas and find a small cluster of cabins in
the hills where the inhabitants are all family and rarely venture away. Offer
the uncle and his nephew the same deal, suddenly the same 'anomaly' will show.

------
vacri
I find this article very weird. I completed a psychology/neurobiology degree
in '94 at a second-tier Australian university. Half the stuff in this article
was obvious then. The idea of physical differences being different between
cultures wasn't (like the neuroimagers mention in the article), but so much of
the rest of the content was.

Visual lines, as quickly glossed over in the article, are different for
westerners used to square corners... but this is hardly news. The idea that
your environment shapes your perceptions goes back at _least_ as far as 1970,
when Blakemoore & Cooper did their vertical/horizontal line experiment on
kittens: kittens raised in an environment where they only ever see vertical
lines cannot later perceive horizontal lines and vice versa.

And the idea that moral reasoning is somehow genetic? What kind of craziness
is this? Throw a brick and you'll hit a family whose children have quite
different moral reasoning to their parents. Or between neighbours. Same for
the other features of socialisation that they mentioned.

At one stage the author even mentioned that Westerners are the product of
"thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies". A thousand
generations ago, we hadn't even reached the Neolithic period, let alone
'thousands'. This part of our history isn't particularly well known for its
trading culture.

It just seems strange that these guys are painted as anthropologists, yet find
it surprising that social aspects of the human are different in different
cultures.

 _THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to
make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition
will be a herculean task._

Here is the nub that annoys me about the article. _Accounting_ for the
influence of culture is a difficult one - doing a study in your home city is
considerably easier than doing it against a representative slice of world
cultures. However, _recognising_ the influence of culture on social actions
(like the 'fair money divide' or moral reasoning (particularly moral
reasoning... I'm still gobsmacked the author even suggested it was genetic))
is something we've known for a very long time, yet the article paints it as
'astonished everyone'.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good point to make, that studies done on any aspect
of the human condition can vary between cultures and that that's often
overlooked, but it really isn't as astonishing as the article makes out.

~~~
chippy
It's astonishing and not obvious to others - those outside of the small group
of people in the know. It has applications far exceeding social science.

~~~
vacri
For the layperson, sure. But the article is saying that researchers in the
field are astonished.

And even the layperson should be able to tell that moral reasoning isn't
genetic.

~~~
randallsquared
Really? It's just obvious, huh?

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-nature-nurture-
nietz...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-nature-nurture-nietzsche-
blog/201005/did-morality-evolve)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals)

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025148#pone-0025148-g001)

~~~
vacri
In the nature vs nurture debate, the pure nature and pure nurture people are
extremist views, and most people are somewhere in-between. The articles you
have presented are talking about mild effects - and the first article is
chock-full of weasel words... and ultimately talks about morality as being a
way to controls our 'evolved selves' (where the author uses 'evolved' to mean
'genotypical').

I mean, let's keep it in context of the article: _they began to find research
suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial
reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral
reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These
differences, they believed, were not genetic._

If moral reasoning were genetic, then you wouldn't have people losing or
changing religions, and there'd be no such thing as social movements. The
article isn't talking about subtle effects on individuals from serotonin
levels, it's suggesting that it was generally accepted that 'wide cultural
differences' were genetic, and that the researchers in question were taking an
unusual path in thinking they weren't genetic.

~~~
randallsquared
"If moral reasoning were genetic, then you wouldn't have people losing or
changing religions, and there'd be no such thing as social movements."

This might be true if genes _completely determined_ morality, but I don't
think anyone is saying that, as you allude to in your first paragraph. The
fact that exercise can affect strength doesn't mean that genes don't play a
very large part in the range of strength a species can have. The main thing I
was objecting to in your initial comment was the idea that it's so obvious
that genes and evolution have nothing to do with morality that even someone
with no training (a layperson) can see that[1]. That is to say, you seemed to
be advocating pure nurture, yourself.

[1] Not to mention the existence of lots of popsci books and essays on
precisely the subject of morality being strongly affected by our evolutionary
history.

------
dfc
Maybe I missed it but I could not find a link to actual paper. Actual paper:

PDF:
[http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf](http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf)

DOI:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X](http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X)

 _NB: The paper is not free from the publisher, pdf is hosted on author 's
website. DOI merely provided for the benefit of folks using citation managers.
How I long for bibdesk on linux._

------
peterjmag
One of the comments in this thread blew up the page layout:
[http://i.imgur.com/G3edwiY.png](http://i.imgur.com/G3edwiY.png) (in Chrome
too). Not sure which one though. Any ideas?

~~~
nsenifty
It is the comment that starts with "From the research paper:". It has non-
breaking spaces instead of regular spaces, perhaps due to copy paste.

------
roberthahn
I learned about this study through Daniel Solis's blog[1]. He's a game
designer.

His article discusses the fact that American and European boardgames reflect
the cultural differences they were designed in. If you know the terms
"Ameritrash" and "Euro game" you know what I'm talking about.

As a board game hobbyist, I'm glad that people are looking at and talking
about this research. I'm curious to see if there's a brave soul who can design
an awesome, fun game that provides players with a distinctly different set of
difficult choices that's neither Euro nor Ameritrash.

[1] [http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.ca/2014/04/game-design-
outsi...](http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.ca/2014/04/game-design-outside-euro-
american-binary.html)

------
jeffdavis
It seems like the game is flawed in at least two ways:

1\. Are there two players, or three? If the offer is refused, the researcher
keeps the money. The researcher almost certainly doesn't care, but how the
other participants perceive the role of the researcher is likely to influence
their idea of fairness.

2\. Is the money a gift from one participant to another, or are they dividing
up a gift from the researcher? This difference will also trigger different
responses, some of which may be related to fairness and some not.

Of course, any experiment might tell you something interesting. But trying to
say this is a test for fairness is an oversimplification.

------
jerf
As I write this, the HN title is "Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the
World"... it's not justified because this article is more _that_ Americans are
the "weirdest", _why_ is still very speculative at this point. Considering we
just came to grip with it, in academic terms, and still have only the fuzziest
pictures as to the details, "why" is a bit premature.

I also find it intriguing that even as we finally identify that cultures may
in fact be profoundly different and not merely superficially different, which
calls the entire liberal idea of fundamental American evil into question by
cutting away the most foundational assumptions it is based on, the author
still can't resist leaping to the assumption that Americans are somehow
_wrong_. It's most clear in this bit: _Is my thinking so strange that I have
little hope of understanding people from other cultures? Can I mold my own
psyche or the psyches of my children to be less WEIRD and more able to think
like the rest of the world? If I did, would I be happier?_

I'll accept the last question as at least a bit of humility, but, well, before
one goes socially engineering one's own child, shouldn't we first explore this
matter more deeply and ask whether it's even a _good idea_? And the idea
casually underlies several other bits of prose, too. It will take long to
purge this poisonous idea from academia, but perhaps now we can finally start.

This is deeply revolutionary stuff if academia actually comes to accept this
(to the point that I would not be surprised this becomes one of those "the old
guard must die before this can be accepted" sorts of things), and even as the
article sort of brushes on this topic, I don't think it really captures just
how _foundational_ the assumptions this destroys are. It's not merely a sort
of accepted doctrine of modern academic liberalism, the fundamental lack of
diversity in human cognition is one of the most foundational foundations, sunk
so deep that you can't even notice it unless you go looking.

One of the worries I think would come up is the fear that this might turn into
a new judgment of which cultures are "better", but this article does,
thankfully, already get into the right of thinking about that question, which
is, better for _what_? Dropping a comfortable western person into a primitive,
tribal environment and watching their maladaptive behaviors has long been a
topic for movies, for instance (even if it is usually followed up by Mighty
Whitey storyline [1]... follow that link if the phrasing concerns you, the
racist overtones of that phrase are _quite_ deliberate and derogatory of what
it is describing). Cultures are different for reasons, and "better" requires
context... but, correspondingly, so therefore does "worse".

[1]:
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey)

~~~
3pt14159
I've been on this site for over 5 years and I'm getting pretty sick of the
lack of very basic design.

Look at this image:

[http://i.imgur.com/kR94sqv.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/kR94sqv.jpg)

Not only does it blow by the character limit, it goes right off the end of my
screen. These problems are fixable. I'm not advocating a complete overhaul,
but how many times have you mistapped / misclicked on a vote button and not
been able to reverse it? How come there is still no way to collapse threads?
Very basic things.

~~~
nokcha
> it goes right off the end of my screen.

It's caused by the non-breaking spaces (Unicode character U+00A0) in this
comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685599)

A CSS workaround to read this page:

    
    
      .comment {
          display: block;
          max-width: 800px;
      }

~~~
tlb
Thanks, I manually fixed that comment.

------
totalrobe
These indigenous people probably split earnings among one another
afterwards... this test among a small isolated group with compared with random
Americans could not possibly work

------
oneandoneis2
The fact that they thought their research would get a negative reception
clearly shows they're not cynical enough: They were providing a cast-iron case
for everyone in the field to say "We need more funding to do new research" :)

------
gottasayit
_Henrich’s work with the ultimatum game was an example of a small but growing
countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at
the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition._

It's so sad that academics in the social sciences fields are terrified to ask
honest questions that they might not like the answers to.

I guess that's the reason that social sciences get disrespected so heavily.

The funny thing is that the REAL question that these people don't want to face
is "Are these differences more than just cultural? Are they genetic?"

They'd as soon ask that question as a Baptist congregation would seriously
ponder Occam's Razor and a need to posit a deity.

~~~
vacri
Please drop the stereotype of the social sciences. And yes, there's been
plenty of studies on genetics in the social sciences.

I always find the hostility some HN members have towards the social sciences
to be rather weird. Half of what HN is here for is firmly in the bailiwick of
the social sciences. A/B testing? Better marketing? Understanding your
employees better? Taking care of yourself so you don't burn out? All of this
stuff is the much-maligned social sciences.

Some people have this stereotype that all psychologists are touchy-feely
hippies, and they're really not.

~~~
gottasayit
_Please drop the stereotype of the social sciences._

Did you read the article? These researchers were legitimately frightened at
how their work would be received and in my opinion it's only heretical in a
minor way... AND THEY'RE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS!

 _I always find the hostility some HN members have towards the social
sciences_

Yeah, that's why my original post (that in a computer analysis context
wouldn't have raised an eyebrow) is being moderated into the dirt.

~~~
dang
This comment breaks at least three of the HN guidelines: it's uncivil ("Did
you read the article?"), uses all caps for emphasis, and complains about being
downvoted.

Please don't do those things on Hacker News.

------
BugBrother
Ok, afaik we're evolved to be programmed by culture -- we're more optimized to
get respect from others than to earn money.

But... I wonder how much of this is an effect of an inability to see some
things about other cultures, because of political correctness?

Some differences are just shocking to modern westerners.

If you have read a bit of mideaval history, you realize there are some
similarity between traditional clan cultures and modern organized crime
families; e.g. the lack of humanity assigned to outsiders. This is not
possible to discuss, since some places on the planet still have similar
societies.

Another example is that tolerated pederasm (greek/roman style) is not gone
from the planet. It is hard to know, since it isn't really discussed even by
e.g. NY Times.

(All these are obvious examples from my own media, yours might be different.)

~~~
tshepang
What is the meaning of 'pederasm'?

~~~
Renaud
I believe the parent meant "paederasty".

From Wikipedia:

 _Pederasty or paederasty (US /ˈpɛdəræsti/ or UK /ˈpiːdəræsti/) is a (usually
erotic) homosexual relationship between an adult male and a pubescent or
adolescent male. The word pederasty derives from Greek (paiderastia) "love of
boys",[1] a compound derived from παῖς (pais) "child, boy" and ἐραστής
(erastēs) "lover"._

------
wil421
How does this have to do with "Americans"? I think the comparison was more
towards indegionus native people verses civilized ones?

Where is the comparison to other more civilized people like Europeans, Asian
countries, Africans, or even Russians.

~~~
chippy
The article mentioned in a few places why North Americans were more weird than
other Westerners in particular.

~~~
wil421
>more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from
2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States
alone.

And I didnt see any data from what happens when they did the "money game" with
Europeans, Asians, Africans, even developed South Americans.

~~~
chillax
Probably due to the narrow focus:

"Recent comparative work has dramatically altered this initial picture. Two
unified projects (which we call Phase 1 and Phase 2) have deployed the
Ultimatum Game and other related experimental tools across thousands of sub-
jects randomly sampled from 23 small-scale human societies, including
foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and subsistence farmers, drawn from
Africa, Amazonia, Oceania, Siberia, and New Guinea"

from:
[http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf](http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf)

------
lettergram
I think the difference the author fails to take into account is (a) religious
beliefs, (b) purchasing power, (c) economic class.

Respectively,

(a) Religious beliefs differ between countries and if someone believes that
"sharing" is better than "self-interest" that will effect the outcome of this
"game." This could help to explain why this country is relatively poor.

(b) $100 in the U.S. is equivalent to significantly more in this country...

(c) If everyone is very poor and you are very poor you're in the same boat, if
your neighbors would be angry that you took $100 and left them out to dry this
could be pretty bad for you. Even if this is not the case, you feel bound to
these people and you likely don't want to "screw them over"

~~~
sbd
Just to provide some counter-points and discussion:

(a) Not everyone in the US is religious; and of those that are, not all
religious people think of sharing in the same way. I think it would be
difficult to say religion in the US is what causes people to split more
equitably. Also we do not know the beliefs of the foreign populations in the
article.

(b) In both cases it was a meaningful amount of money. The article stated it
was worth a few days pay in one of the countries, $100 is about 2 days pay at
minimum wage in the US.

(c)I think your point here speaks to the psyche of American's that the author
writes about. It would be interesting to perform the game within "only poor"
sample groups and "only wealthy" sample groups inside the US.

