Humans’ willingness to enforce fairness by punishing greed — even when doing so is costly —appears to be a major advantage we enjoy over other primates, one that promotes collaboration and thus has underpinned human progress. So says The Economist, reporting on recent scientific research (hat tip: The Lead).
(This evidence is consistent, it seems to me, with the possibility that love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself may be akin to a law of nature, a part of the fundamental fabric of the universe.)
There’s a well-known experiment called the “ultimatum game.” Two people, call them “Alice” and “Bob,” have to decide how to divide, say, $100 between them. Alice proposes a split; Bob decides whether to accept or reject the split.
The key to the ultimatum game is that if Bob rejects Alice’s proposed split, neither he nor Alice gets anything. You’d think Bob would agree to just about anything Alice proposed; even if he got only $1, with the other $99 going to Alice, that’d still be $1 more than he had before, so he’d be ahead of the game.
But for reasons not fully understood, humans don’t play the game that way. If Alice were to get too greedy, Bob likely would reject her proposed split even though as a result he’d end up with nothing:
Scores of studies have run the ultimatum game across cultures and ages. Universally, people reject any share lower than 20%—apparently to punish the greed of the proposer. People do not act like Homo economicus. Instead, they are the arbiters of fairness.
(Emphasis added.)
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have found that chimpanzees evidently don’t share this willingness to punish greed. The Economist article points out that some evolutionary scientists believe humans’ innate willingness to punish notes:
. . . Though [chimpanzee] proposers consistently chose the highest possible number of raisins for themselves, responders rarely rejected even the stingiest offers.
This is a telling outcome. A number of researchers in the field of human evolution think that a sense of fairness—and a willingness to punish the unfair even at some cost to oneself—is humanity’s “killer app”. It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value.
Dr Jensen’s previous experiments have shown that chimpanzees are willing to punish actual thieves. But his new data add weight to the theory that the more sophisticated idea of fair shares, which underpins collaborative behaviour, appeared in the hominid line only after the ancestors of the two species split from one another.
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)
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