AN EXCERPT
FROM TAMLER SOMMERS'S
A VERY BAD WIZARD.
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Ian McEwan calls A Very Bad Wizard "an intellectual feast, completely engrossing." We call it unlike anything we've ever published, and essential reading for anyone curious about the origins and inner workings of our moral lives. To buy a copy, please go here.
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For much of the last century, the dominant economic model of human behavior was known as Homo economicus—a model which predicts that human beings will always act according to their (perceived) rational self-interest. Over the last twenty years, however, researchers in the flourishing field of behavioral economics have challenged this picture of human nature. Through the use of simple but ingenious experiments, these researchers have shown some of the ways that human beings systematically depart from self-interested behavior. The most famous of these experiments is known as the ultimatum game, and it works like this: subjects are randomly assigned into two roles, proposer or responder. Proposers are given twenty dollars and told that they can offer their responder anything between one dollar and the whole amount. Responders have two choices: they can accept and walk away with whatever amount the proposer has offered, or they can reject the offer, in which case neither the proposer nor the responder will receive any money at all. That's the whole game.
Now imagine that you're a subject in one of these experiments, and you're the responder. Your proposer is anonymous, but let's call him Doug. If Doug is a member of the species Homo economicus, his only concern will be to walk away with as much money as he can. He'll therefore be tempted to offer only one dollar and keep the remaining nineteen. Doug's only worry is that you'll reject the offer, in which case he will walk away empty-handed. But then Doug would think about it from your perspective. If you're also a member of Homo economicus, you'll accept any offer no matter how low it is. Why? Because one dollar is better than nothing, and nothing is what you'll get if you reject. So Doug can safely make the lowest possible offer of one dollar. And according to the model, you'll accept it.
But consider: how would you really behave in this situation? The choice to make Doug a proposer and you a responder was completely arbitrary. You don't deserve any less money than Doug, do you? The fair thing to do is to split the pot, right? And then he comes up with this insulting offer, one dollar, 5 percent of the total amount. Is that fair? Are you going to let him get away with that?
If you're like most readers, the answer is likely no. You'll gladly sacrifice the dollar to punish his greed. Nor is it likely that you'd have received such a low offer in the first place. In the experiments conducted in America in the past twenty years, the most common offer proposers make is a full 50 percent of the pot. And when low or unfair offers do come, re-sponders tend to reject them, even in high-stakes games when the amount is still substantial. Homo economicus may not care about things like fairness, justice, and not getting screwed over. But it seems that human beings do—even at a cost to our own interests.
So where does Joseph Henrich come into this picture? As a graduate student in anthropology, Henrich was especially attuned to one drawback of these studies: the results were coming from a narrow range of subjects. Since the researchers were economists and psychologists working in universities, their participant pools were comprised almost exclusively of college students, mostly American. Henrich had the brilliant idea of expanding the range of subjects not just demographically, but also culturally. He took the ultimatum game and other experiments to southeastern Peru and ran them with the Machiguenga, a family-centered forager-horticultural society scattered throughout the Peruvian Amazon.
This kind of study was unprecedented in his field. Anthropologists are trained to do ethnography, to observe people in their natural environments and to describe what they see—no controlled experiments allowed. Henrich went ahead with the study anyway, and he came back with unexpected results. While the Machiguenga people did not behave in line with the Homo economicus model, they didn't behave like Americans either. For one thing, they didn't reject low offers in the ultimatum game. Further studies indicated that Americans and the Machiguenga have strikingly different ideas about fairness and justice, and Henrich's methods allowed him to measure these differences in quantifiable terms.
The study sparked a great deal of interest and led to a large MacArthur Foundation grant. The grant funded a large-scale project to conduct similar experiments in fifteen small-scale societies in field sites all across the globe. These studies revealed cross-cultural differences in attitudes about morality and justice in ways that no other analysis has been able to uncover. More generally, by incorporating methodologies from fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and experimental economics, Henrich and his colleagues paved the way for a revolution in the social sciences, a way of moving past the deep divisions among of the disciplines.
Joe Henrich was trained in anthropology at UCLA. He was an associate professor at Emory University before becoming the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition & Evolution at the University of British Columbia in 2006. He is the author, most recently, of Why Humans Cooperate (2007). I flew out to Vancouver to interview him this past summer, and returned home wondering why anyone would choose not to live in that city.
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I. FEAR FACTOR FOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS
TAMLER SOMMERS: You spent a lot of time—well over a year—with the Machiguenga, right? Did you bring back any good stories—especially ones that show some of the different ways in which they view the world?
JOSEPH HENRICH: One thing that really came across, and it happened to be going on while we there, is this. Missionaries contacted the Machiguenga in the middle of the last century. The missionaries wanted Bible translators, so they tried to get a democratic situation going. And so now each Machiguenga community has an official elected chief. They're in charge of getting development going in the village. The village is really just a cluster of independent families gathered around a school. And then in the rainy season, when school is out of session, everyone disappears to the forest. So there's one elected guy whose job it is to make sure the lawn gets cut and community buildings get built. And we watched day after day as this poor guy tried to get other people to help build the school. He'd blow his horn, no one would come. He'd go around door-to-door, maybe he'd get one or two people to help for a little while, but then they'd leave and go off to lunch. In the end, the teachers had to force the students to build their own school. And this is contrasted with these villages in Fiji I've been working in the last five years. They have chiefdoms, villages of about the same size, are similarly subsistence-based, on manioc and fish. But there, when the chief asks for help, everyone shows up, the whole situation runs like clockwork. The community buildings get built. Because they have norms about cooperation.
TS: And the Machiguenga just don't.
JH: They're ruggedly independent, to say the least.
TS: Right—in the book you say they would make the cowboy in the American Western look like a pathetic conformist.
JH: Yes.
TS: Any interesting anthropologist fish-out-water experiences?
JH: Well, the one I always think of happened when I first got off the plane. I think of it as my first real test as anthropologist. A woman came and saw us and brought out these bowls of masato. Traditionally, the Machiguenga would take manioc* and chew it up and then spit it into a pot and cook it. And the spit causes it to ferment, turning it into an alcoholic beverage.
TS: Is this the chichi?
JH: In other places it's called chichi, the Machiguenga call it masato. Really it's just chewed up manioc. I knew I'd have to be drinking essentially someone else's saliva. And when they gave it to me, it really smelled like vomit. I was able to sort of hold my breath and get it down.
TS: Sounds like a reality show. It's interesting; spit-based beverages came up in my interview with Steve Stich. He used chicha as an analogy for moral claims, disgustingness claims. He thinks chicha is disgusting, but not that it's objectively true that it's disgusting. The Peruvians aren't wrong when they say that it's tasty. We project the disgustingness onto the world—the disgustingness seems like it's in the chicha, but really the disgust comes from within us. And the same goes for terms like unfair or wrong.
JH: Yeah, and it reminds me of another Machiguenga ex-ample of mine. Evolutionary psychologists often talk about food tastes being the product of evolution. And we might have some food tastes that are a product of evolution, but which foods we eat are much more culturally transmitted. I was hiking with the Machiguenga one time, and we decided to stop for a snack. They rolled over a log and picked up these long, slimy-looking larvae and started eating them. They like them because they're full of fat. I like fat too, but I didn't want to eat the larvae. That taste wasn't culturally transmitted to me.
TS: So the taste for fat in general is universal, but...
JH: Not the larvae.
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* A root vegetable and staple of the Machiguenga diet.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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An Excerpt from Tamler Sommers's A Very Bad Wizard By Tamler Sommers
Letters to Santa Written By Shakespeare Characters By Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim
Furious Cousins' World Famous Holiday Punch By Graham T. Beck
A Pragmatic Romantic Says Farewell to His Lover By Spencer Ham
Patronizing the Arts By Josh Silverstein
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