Experimenting with Social Norms, edited by Jean Ensminger and Joseph Henrich, compiles and synthesizes a rich combination of experimental and ethnographic findings from an international team of anthropologists and economists aimed at investigating the tensions between cooperation and self-interest across diverse human societies. How do societies manage to solve problems collectively, enticing individuals to forego their own narrow short-term economic interests in a way that benefits the whole group, and fosters mutually beneficial exchange? And furthermore, how does the decision to subordinate one’s self-interests for the larger group—or what Ensminger and Henrich call prosocial behavior—vary among different societies based on locally acquired social norms and motivations?
Using experimental economics games, this team examined levels of fairness, cooperation, and norms for punishing those who violate expectations of equality across a diverse swath of societies, from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to a small town in rural Missouri. The researchers employed the following games to assess each group’s level of prosociality:
Dictator Game
Two players from the same community, interacting anonymously, are given a sum of money equivalent to one day’s wages to split. Player 1, assigned to be the “dictator,” decides how to allocate the money between the two players. Both players receive the actual amounts of money that Player 1 “dictates.” In Europe and the U.S. a fifty-fifty split is considered a “fair” outcome.Ultimatum Game
This version of the dictator game adds an ultimatum: Though Player 1 decides how to allocate the money, Player 2 may reject the offer—in which case, neither party receives anything. The behavior of Player 1 in this scenario has elements of both fairness and strategy, while the behavior of Player 2 in this game captures the price that people are willing to pay to punish Player 1 for what they perceive to be an unfair offer. The willingness to punish an anonymous partner for unfairness, at a personal monetary cost, can be interpreted as prosocial behavior because this punishment may alter Player 1’s future interactions with other group members.Third-Party Punishment Game
In this experiment, two people play the Dictator Game with the addition of a third anonymous player— endowed with an amount of money equivalent to half the amount given to the first two players—who has the option of using any part of his or her money to punish Player 1 for making an unfair offer to Player 2. Unlike the Ultimatum Game, in the Third-Party Punishment Game, the person paying a price to do the punishing is not the injured party.
The recent swell of media attention around French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has propelled it to the New York Times’ bestseller list and the #1 spot on Amazon. An ambitious examination of income inequality, Piketty’s work illuminates the mechanisms that allow wealth to concentrate in the top 1% of society. He argues that when the rate of return on existing capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, the wealth of the rich will accumulate faster than that of the rest of society, exacerbating inequality and heralding in a new Gilded Age.
Though Piketty’s book has been the subject of a robust discussion between journalists and pundits, how does it stack up before a Nobel Prize winning economist? In his review of the book for The New Republic, Robert Solow—the 1987 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and the Russell Sage Foundation’s Robert S. Merton Scholar—says that Piketty’s theory on inequality is right. Calling Piketty’s paradigm the “rich-get-richer dynamic,” Solow describes the book as a “new and powerful contribution to an old topic.” Piketty’s theory, Solow further notes, also portends that not only will the rich get richer across the board, but inherited wealth in society will increase faster than that of recently earned (and therefore more merit-based) fortunes.
On Tuesday, April 29, the National Academy of Sciences announced the election of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 15 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
This feature is part of a new RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.
On Tuesday, April 22, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 to allow states to ban affirmative action, or the use of race as a factor in admissions to state universities. The ruling, which upheld Michigan’s constitutional amendment banning affirmative action, came on the heels of last June’s controversial Fisher v. University of Texas case, in which a white applicant rejected for admission to the University of Texas sought to challenge the school’s race-conscious admissions policy.
Natasha Warikoo, a current RSF Visiting Scholar and Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is examining student perspectives on admissions policies at elite institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. Drawing from 144 in-depth interviews with undergraduates at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford, Warikoo’s research focuses on how students’ conceptions of diversity and merit, along with institutional supports for inter-cultural contact, inform campus experiences, especially related to race.
In a new interview with the Foundation, she discussed her ongoing comparative research, including the ways in which the different admissions policies across two regions can significantly influence how students view themselves and their fellow classmates.
Q. Your research here at RSF investigates the way undergraduate students at elite universities in the U.S. (Harvard and Brown) and the U.K. (Oxford and Cambridge) understand the relationship between meritocracy and admissions. Could you give a brief summary of the main differences between universities' admissions considerations in these two regions, and explain how the admission process subsequently shapes students' conceptions of merit?
This feature is part of a new RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.
The damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina unevenly impacted the residents of New Orleans along racial and class lines. While many scholars and politicians have focused on the lack of federal aid to low-income black neighborhoods in the wake of the disaster, Visiting Scholar Mark VanLandingham’s research examines a lesser known community—that of the Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in New Orleans in the 1970s. In his time in residence at the Foundation, VanLandingham is investigating the sources and limits of resilience within the Vietnamese American community in New Orleans, with a special focus on the community’s recovery during the post-Katrina era.
In a new interview with the Foundation, VanLandingham discussed the impact of the hurricane on this community, looking in particular at the combination of cultural and material advantages that may have aided the disaster recovery of the Vietnamese.
Q. Your research examines the Vietnamese immigrant community, which was largely overlooked in the post-disaster coverage of Hurricane Katrina. You found that overall this group fared better than other groups in the recovery. How do we measure “recovery” and what did the Vietnamese community’s post-disaster recovery look like in comparison to other groups in New Orleans?