Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...) small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life. Key Words: altruism; cooperation; cross-cultural research; experimental economics; game theory; ultimatum game; public goods game; self-interest. (shrink)

What motives underlie the ways humans interact socially? Are these the same for all societies? Are these part of our nature, or influenced by our environments?Over the last decade, research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus. Literally hundreds of experiments suggest that people care not only about their own material payoffs, but also about such things as fairness, equity and reciprocity. However, this research left fundamental questions unanswered: Are such social preferences stable components of (...) human nature; or, are they modulated by economic, social and cultural environments? Until now, experimental research could not address this question because virtually all subjects had been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the full range of human social and cultural environments. A vast amount of ethnographic and historical research suggests that people's motives are influenced by economic, social, and cultural environments, yet such methods can only yield circumstantial evidence about human motives. Combining ethnographic and experimental approaches to fill this gap, this book breaks new ground in reporting the results of a large cross-cultural study aimed at determining the sources of social preferences that underlie the diversity of human sociality. The same experiments which provided evidence for social preferences among university students were performed in fifteen small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of social, economic and cultural conditions by experienced field researchers who had also done long-term ethnographic field work in these societies. The findings of these experiments demonstrated that no society in which experimental behaviour is consistent with the canonical model of self-interest. Indeed, results showed that the variation in behaviour is far greater than previously thought, and that the differences between societies in market integration and the importance of cooperation explain a substantial portion of this variation, which individual-level economic and demographic variables could not. Finally, the extent to which experimental play mirrors patterns of interaction found in everyday life is traced.The book starts with a succinct but substantive introduction to the use of game theory as an analytical tool and its use in the social sciences for the rigorous testing of hypotheses about fundamental aspects of social behaviour outside artificially constructed laboratories. The results of the fifteen case studies are summarized in a suggestive chapter about the scope of the project. (shrink)

Recent investigations have uncovered large, consistent deviations from the predictions of the textbook representation of Homo economicus (Roth et al, 1992, Fehr and Gächter, 2000, Camerer 2001). One problem appears to lie in economists’ canonical assumption that individuals are entirely self-interested: in addition to their own material payoffs, many experimental subjects appear to care about fairness and reciprocity, are willing to change the distribution of material outcomes at personal cost, and reward those who act in a cooperative manner while punishing (...) those who do not even when these actions are costly to the individual. These deviations from what we will term the canonical model have important consequences for a wide range of economic phenomena, including the optimal design of institutions and contracts, the allocation of property rights, the conditions for successful collective action, the analysis of incomplete contracts, and the persistence of noncompetitive wage premia. Fundamental questions remain unanswered. Are the deviations from the canonical model evidence of universal patterns of behavior, or do the individual’s economic and social environments shape behavior? If the latter, which economic and social conditions are involved? Is reciprocal behavior better explained statistically by individuals’ attributes such as their sex, age, or relative wealth, or by the attributes of the group to which the individuals belong? Are there cultures that approximate the canonical account of self-regarding behavior? Existing research cannot answer such questions because virtually all subjects have been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the range of all social and cultural environments. To address the above questions, we and our collaborators undertook a large cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public good, and dictator games.. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Experiments are not models of cooperation; instead, they demonstrate the presence of the ethical and other-regarding predispositions that often motivate cooperation and the punishment of free-riders. Experimental behavior predicts subjects' cooperation in the field. Ethnographic studies in small-scale societies without formal coercive institutions demonstrate that disciplining defectors is both essential to cooperation and often costly to the punisher.

One of the leading thinkers to emerge in the postwar conservative intellectual revival was the sociologist Robert Nisbet. His book The Quest for Community, published in 1953, stands as one of the most persuasive accounts of the dilemmas confronting modern society. Nearly a half century before Robert Putnam documented the atomization of society in Bowling Alone, Nisbet argued that the rise of the powerful modern state had eroded the sources of community—the family, the neighborhood, the church, the guild. (...) Alienation and loneliness inevitably resulted. But as the traditional ties that bind fell away, the human impulse toward community led people to turn even more to the government itself, allowing statism—even totalitarianism—to flourish. This edition of Nisbet’s magnum opus features a brilliant introduction by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and three critical essays. Published at a time when our communal life has only grown weaker and when many Americans display cultish enthusiasm for a charismatic president, this new edition of The Quest for Community shows that Nisbet’s insights are as relevant today as ever. (shrink)

Emotions, according to David Hume, are “simple and uniform impressions,” “internal” impressions which are related to other impressions according to an empirically demonstrable set of “laws of association.” The notion that an emotion is “simple” and a mere “impression” accounts for the relatively little attention the topic of “the passions” has received in modern philosophy, at least until very recently. Unlike “ideas,” to which such “impressions” are usually contrasted, emotions are thought to be preconceptual, unintelligent, irrational, causal products of “animal (...) spirits” of a sub-human nature, mere “feelings” which deserve none of the careful analysis so often dedicated to the structures of perception, knowledge and reason. In Descartes’ treatise on the passions, for example, “animal spirits” and the crude physiology of emotions take priority over his quick and often glib quasi-conceptual analyses of them. His analysis is thoroughly strait jacketed by the dubious dualism that usually bears his name, and ever since, the question whether emotions should be thought of as mere “feelings” or “impressions” or rather conceived of in terms of their physiology and manifestations in behavior has dominated what little study of emotions existed before this century. (shrink)

Chasing the fading contours if the past. Pursuing points of intersection. Encounters with aging literary figures and surviving witnesses to history. Excavating printed artifacts in the back rooms of used book shops. Locating of equipment lost or discarded. Conversations with Paul Bowles & Mohammed Mrabet, Brion Gysin, "Pauline Réage, Robert Graves, Maurice Girodias, Berthe Cleyrergue, Edouard Roditi, Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky." --Back cover.

The first Ethics Bowl competition was established in the 1990s by Dr. Robert Ladenson of the Illinois Institute of Technology to help students reason through ethical challenges they will face in their personal and professional lives, and help them develop responsibilities as citizens of a democracy. Since then, the Ethics Bowl format and its pedagogical goals have been adapted to many other academic disciplines and a variety of student and professional populations. Our aim was to quantify the growth of (...) the Ethics Bowl concept by enumerating and describing extant Ethics Bowl programs, outlining both pedagogical goals and operational aspects. Using respondent-driven sampling, we identified 20 Ethics Bowl programs across the globe, reaching tens of thousands of participants annually, and an additional two programs preparing to launch in the near future. We conclude by making recommendations for pedagogical and operational dimensions of the programs. (shrink)

Explaining Norms is a work in philosophy of social science aspiring to provide an account of norms, their general character, their kinds ðformal, legal, moral, and socialÞ, what they can explain, and what explains their dynamic ðemergence, persistence, and unravelingÞ. The authors engage with various positions in ethics, political philosophy, and ðto some extentÞ the philosophy of law. The discussion is rewarding and inventive—it provides distinctive and intriguing views on several topics ðe.g., on the distinction between moral and social normsÞ. (...) There are a lot of ideas here. Perhaps this is predictable, given that the work is a product of four capable minds. What is surprising is the range of ideas and arguments on which the authors manage to agree and out of which they construct one reasonably cohesive account. Given the wide range of literatures discussed, readers are likely to find much of interest. Not surprisingly, some related literatures do seem to be underplayed—treated in a few footnotes and somewhat by the way, with little development of systematic connections. There are thriving literatures in comparative psychology/ ethology, moral psychology, and cultural anthropology that are devoted to how we humans manage to cooperate and coordinate as we do. While there are footnotes to some of this literature ðsee the index for, e.g., Boyd, Bowles, Camerer, Gintis, and HenrichÞ, many readers would have benefited from a discussion that more fully related the position developed in Explaining Norms to that work in experimental economics and anthropology. Discussing the relationships with work in moral psychology and ethology would also have been appreciated ðHaidt, de Waal, and Tomasello are not mentionedÞ. Still, there is very much to like about what is treated here. The authors seek conceptually individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for being a norm. On the account provided, norms are something on the order of normative principles accepted in some group ð3–4Þ. Thus, norms involve some normative principle, possessing “a certain generality of scope and application.” These principles need not be objectively correct or fitting, and they may be objectively “simply awful” ð3Þ. The central questions have to do with what is involved in some group accepting these normative principles. The authors locate their position in two dimensions. (shrink)

Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone and subsequent works has analysed the phenomenon that American society increasingly avoids various community driven activities, such as civic associations, activities with friends and family (Putnam, Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, New York; 2006). In this paper we introduce the idea that a counterpart to this social trend is a global addiction to fame and celebrity. We believe that the global internet is one of the major drivers of this search for fame (...) for the sake of being famous. However, most people aspiring to be famous celebrities will not succeed in this quest, and become disappointed. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ethical implications of such social contagion, bandwagon effects in today's global business environment towards fame and celebrity. The contribution of this paper is to provide a future direction for research on business ethics in terms of this growing global phenomenon of fame and celebrity addiction. (shrink)

Critics of Robert Nozick's libertarian political theory often allege that the theory in general and its account of property rights in particular lack sufficient foundations. A key difficulty is thought to lie in his account of how portions of the world which no one yet owns can justly come to be initially acquired. But the difficulty is illusory, because the concept of justice does not meaningfully apply to initial acquisition in the first place. Moreover, the principle of self-ownership provides (...) a solid foundation for Nozick's libertarianism, and when seen in the light of that principle and its full implications, the standard purported examples of injustices in acquisition are revealed to be nothing of the kind. Footnotesa The original draft of this paper was written in the summer of 2002 while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. I thank the directors of the Center, Fred D. Miller, Jr., Ellen Frankel Paul, and Jeffrey Paul, for hosting me. I also thank colloquium audience members at Bowling Green State University for comments on that draft. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 3-19 [Access article in PDF] Some Reflections about Community and Survival Rita M. Gross University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Many studies have indicated that at both ends of the life cycle human beings more readily survive and flourish if they experience significant contact with other humans, if they experience nurturing, love, and relationship. Having physical needs met, by itself, is not sufficient. Both infants and old (...) people, as well as people recovering from serious illness, are much more likely to survive if, in addition to having their physical needs met, they experience the emotional well-being brought about by sufficient companionship.Though the issue is less discussed, one wonders why things would be different in those phases of the life cycle in which one is seemingly more independent. How can adults flourish and thrive without sufficient companionship, love, and community? How do adults react to the absence of these important elements of life? I would suggest that relatively helpless infants, invalids, and aged people simply die, but adults have enough power and independence to react to their loneliness and frustration in ways that lash out at the social fabric that fails to love and nurture them sufficiently. In Buddhist psychology an organism's two most frequent reactions to stimulation are grasping at something or aggression toward it. I would suggest that unnurtured adults express their frustration with loneliness and lack of love precisely in those two ways. We have discussed these reactions in our previous sessions on war and on consumerism and its attendant environmental degradation.I agreed very reluctantly to write a paper for this session on community. I am reluctant for two reasons. First, I have already written on community, do not wish to repeat myself, and am not sure I have anything new to say. Thus, I end up with the option of being more personal in my reflections than I usually am. (I know some of you will think that could not be possible, because I always go too far on that score. My apologies.) Second, as a female academic and someone with no family who has been single most of my life, I know only too well the loneliness and frustration that come with living in a society with declining "social capital," to use the phrase so aptly employed by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. The topic is simply too painful for me, because I know intimately, by virtue of their absence in my life, the importance of companionship, friendship, and community. I appreciated all the [End Page 3] graphs and documentation in Putnam's book, but despite my many years of intense involvement in the Buddhist world, I already knew in my gut the main thesis of his book. Nevertheless, much of what I will write about in this paper is informed by Putnam's book, as well as by David Korten's The Post-Corporate World and bell hooks's All About Love, both of which I recommend as relevant reading materials as we prepare to discuss the topic of community.By contrast, for our first discussions of community in our 1987 meetings, I was eager to make a contribution. 1 I had discovered something, or so it seemed to me, that was both painful and important. In the early 1980s I began to realize that despite the energy and loyalty I brought to my Buddhist community, I was still lonely and was not experiencing the friendship, community, companionship, and support that seemed to me to be implied in the act of "going for refuge to the sangha. " Instead, people constantly told me that being alone was essential to Buddhist practice—a claim that I would contend has more to do withWestern notions of individualism and self-reliance than with Buddhism. Understandably, these values are especially strong among convert Buddhists, who had to defy convention and assert their individuality in the process of becoming Buddhists. Nevertheless, we were signing on to honor the refuge of sangha, not merely the refuges of Buddha and dharma, a point that is still underappreciated by many... (shrink)

"East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves"-with these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists in the Atlantic world shaped emerging ideas of ethical commerce to fight the system of plantation slavery that had become an engine of modern capitalism. How did consumers define ethical commerce? How did producers create markets for their products? Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world (...) rather than on the more familiar boycott movements against slave-produced goods. Different approaches to making money in ethical commerce-through commercial agriculture, government contracts, international trade, and money management-shaped the relationship between production, consumption, and morality in ways that determined how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. Companies such as Macaulay & Babington in Sierra Leone, Roberts & Colson in Liberia, and Forster & Smith in the Gambia used commercial networks and government subsidies to make "legitimate" commerce pay. Ethical commerce was also promoted by former slaves in such organizations as the Colored Free Produce Society, which promoted the idea that consumers bore responsibility for the plight of the slave and could change their buying behavior. This book illuminates global consumer society and industrial capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as underscores the roles of slavery and antislavery movements in the development of international capitalism. It also reminds us that concerns over fair trade and labor conditions remain relevant today. (shrink)

I offer a defense of the moral side-constraints to which Robert Nozick appeals in Anarchy, State and Utopia but for which he fails to provide a sustained justification. I identify a line of anti-consequentialist argumentation which is present in Nozick and which, in the terminology of Samuel Scheffler, moves first to affirm a personal prerogative which allows the individual not to sacrifice herself for the sake of the best overall outcome and second moves on to affirm restrictions (i.e., moral (...) side-constraints) which prohibit the individual from suppressing others' exercise of their personal prerogatives even if that suppression would serve the overall good. I argue that one ought to follow this line of anti-consequentialist argumentation all the way to the affirmation of restrictions by showing that the rationale for the adoption of the personal prerogative is not satisfied unless the accompanying restrictions are adopted as well. Footnotesa A distant ancestor of this essay was written during the spring of 1997 when I was a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. The draft of the present essay was composed during the tenure of a summer research grant from the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane University. I am very grateful to both institutions and to Ellen Frankel Paul and Mary Sirridge for their exceedingly helpful editorial advice. (shrink)

In this essay I contrast Freud’s account of mourning in Mourning and Melancholia to that of Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. In suggesting a somatic as well as a psychic response, Merleau-Ponty, I argue, more accurately accounts for the ways in which we experience loss and why, contrary to Freud’s suggestion, mourning’s work is never completed.

This paper is an extension of the analysis of the interpretation of Pierre Duhem's philosophy of science presented by Karen Merikangas Darling in the work 'Motivational Realism: The Natural Classification for Pierre Duhem'. There is some textual support for both realist and antirealist reading of Duhem's work. In this study I consider both realistic and antirealistic interpretations and propose some hints for understanding of Pierre Duhem's philosophy of science.

The strategy I adopt in this paper is as follows. First I seek to show that the authors’ formulation of the notion of "determinism" is defective because it elides some important distinctions. Second, I go on to argue that these defects vitiate some of the contentions made in the paper and alert us to the inadequacy of the self-referential argument developed in it.

IN THIS PAPER I RESPOND TO SEVERAL OBJECTIONS THAT HAVE BEEN MOUNTED TO MY THEORY OF THE MIRACULOUS. IN PARTICULAR I ARGUE THAT ON MY THEORY A MIRACLE IS DECIDEDLY NOT AN EVENT WHICH IS NATURALLY EXPLICABLE FOR "QUA" MIRACLE AN EVENT IS ONLY EXPLICABLE BY REFERENCE TO THE ACTIVITY OF A NON-NATURAL AGENT’S ALTERING THE SURROUNDING CONDITIONS IN VIRTUE OF HIS ACTIVITY IN THE WORLD.

In his recent book, Survival and Disembodied Existence Terence Penelhum presents a convincing case against the belief in disembodied personal survival. His formidable attack constitutes, I think, one of the strongest cases that has yet been made out against such a belief. I am in substantial agreement with his position.