Reader n8chz left a link to a curious article. It discusses an experiment that aimed to find out whether other cultures “shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness.” Whenever I hear of cultures sharing instincts for anything but food and sex, I become suspicious and with good reason, too, since the basis for the conclusion that there is such “basic instinct for fairness” is nothing short of bizarre.
It turns out that a bunch of weird folks conducted a very strange experiment that was later used to make an outlandish conclusion about Americans being more fair than other cultures:
In each game there are two players who remain anonymous to each other. The first player is given an amount of money, say $100, and told that he has to offer some of the cash, in an amount of his choosing, to the other subject. The second player can accept or refuse the split. But there’s a hitch: players know that if the recipient refuses the offer, both leave empty-handed.
Think about this game and consider what you would do if you were one of the participants.
And this is what the study claims most North Americans did:
North Americans, who are the most common subjects for such experiments, usually offer a 50-50 split when on the giving end. When on the receiving end, they show an eagerness to punish the other player for uneven splits at their own expense.
I have no idea what kind of an over-entitled, spoiled, immature brat believes that strangers should be obligated to give him or her half of what they have and throws a hissy fit when they choose not to. I also fail to imagine who can possibly see this infantile insistence that strangers share what they have equally with you as “fairness.” There is nothing fair in the belief that the property of others belongs to you by default. I refuse to believe that Americans are like this. The experiment was probably rigged, or it tested too few people, or there is something we don’t know about the way it was conducted.
The Machiguenga people of Peru, however, seem a lot more normal than these imaginary Americans when they had a chance to play the game:
It became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”
I must be an average Machiguenga because I’m just as appalled that anybody would refuse money just to spite somebody else out of a ridiculous sense of over-entitlement. I don’t think anybody owes me anything in this world. If people want to give me something – no matter how small – of their own free will, I will be extremely grateful. I would never stoop to calculating whether they take more for themselves than they give to me. Doing that would be both unfair and extremely vulgar.
So, Americans, am I right or are the people running this experiment right? Would you act like the Americans or like the Machiguenga in this experiment? Do you agree with me that this experiment was rigged to reflect the experimenter’s own prejudices?
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