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<H3><FONT size=6>Fairness is socially-learned, not innate, research
suggests</FONT></H3></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>USAToday 03/18/10</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>
<P>A group of researchers working in 15 different areas across the globe may
have answered one of the deeper questions of the human condition -- why are we
fair to strangers we'll never see again?</P>
<P>That fairness makes possible the large, interconnected, market-based
societies that have grown up mostly in the last 10,000 years.</P>
<P>Two rival theories have been put forward as to why. One suggests that we're
fair to strangers because we mistakenly treat them like kin, the other that
social conditioning makes us this way.</P>
<P>Writing in today's edition of the journal <A
href="http://www.sciencemag.org/"><EM>Science</EM></A>, the researchers <A
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2010-03/uobc-mar031610.php'">present
evidence</A> that comes down solidly on the side of social conditioning. They
found that people who live in small groups and who grow or catch most of their
own food don't really care that much whether they're fair or unfair to
strangers, or whether a stranger is punished for being unfair.</P>
<P>People who trade for a larger percentage of their daily food and therefore
live in more integrated, larger social groups, are much more likely to be fair
to strangers.</P>
<P>"We think its was really a lot of cultural learning, and it took 10,000 years
of cultural evolution to get to the point where you have a well-run society with
billions of people," says<A href="http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/home.html">
Joe Henrich</A>, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of British
Columbia in Canada, the paper's lead author.</P>
<P>Religion appears to play a part as well. People who follow tribal religions
are also more focused on their kin and friends and don't care too much about
fairness with strangers. People who followed the two world religions in the
areas studied, Christianity or Islam, were more likely to be fair to strangers
and to want to punish unfairness.</P>
<P>The researchers used games to measure how fair a given person tends to be in
interactions where they don't know or aren't related to the person they're
dealing with. They also looked at how willing the person was to punish someone
else who behaved unfairly.</P>
<P>They played these games in 15 different places around the world that varied
in how much they participated in a market economy and how much they participated
in world religions such as Christianity or Islam. Sites included Ghana, Papua,
New Guinea, Tanzania, Siberia, Kenya, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Missouri and
Fiji.</P>
<P>The researchers measured how integrated an individual was into a market
economy by calculating the percentage of calories their family ate which were
purchased rather than grown, hunted or fished and then averaged them for a
community measure. For religion, they asked if the person followed either
Christianity, Islam, a tribal religion or no religion.</P>
<P>People in fully market-integrated societies who practice a world religion
were much more likely to make fair offers to strangers in the games.</P>
<P>The researchers suggest religion may have evolved as societies grew bigger
because it facilitated larger-scale interactions. Reputation-based social
systems start to break down when groups living together get large. Religions
internalize norms for behavior towards strangers, making external force
less necessary and smooth interactions more possible.</P>
<P>"Small scale societies typically don't have high gods that are very powerful.
There's no notion of heaven or hell. They're not <EM>incentivizing </EM>proper
behavior, how you should treat non-kin, stealing and murder, the kinds of things
you need to have a harmonious and moral society," says Henrich. But if people
place faith in high gods and the gods are concerned about moral behavior, about
lying and stealing, it add social and cultural pressure that reinforces those
behaviors.</P>
<P>In terms of punishment, the smaller the community the person lived in, the
less likely they were to want to punish someone for being unfair in how they
played the game. Small hunting-band-sized groups were the least likely to
punish.</P>
<P>Without social norms that make fairness a given, humans don't seem to do well
in social groups over about 300 people, Henrich says. Or at least in <A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea">New Guinea</A>, where it's
been found that when villages get above 300 people, they typically fracture and
break into smaller groups under that number. "The usual reciprocity and kinship
fall apart and there's no larger entity to oversee those conflicts, so they
fracture," he says.</P>
<P>Children certainly aren't born with a tendency towards fairness. In large,
complex societies, they're quite selfish until around the age of 12, when they
begin to be more adult-like, Heinrich says. But even then, the truly adult sense
of fairness doesn't actually come until age 25. "So, it's a long socialization
process."</P>
<P>One thing this means is that the assumption that markets run because people
are selfish doesn't quite work. Actually, Henrich believes, markets run best
because people have some motivation towards fairness and equality. "If you have
fully selfish agents, markets don't work because people can't trust each
other."</P>
<P><EM>By Elizabeth Weise</EM></P></DIV></BODY></HTML>