IFREE-Sponsored Lecture Series at ESI

Michael Gurven, Ph.D.
Apr. 1st, 2011

"Experimental Investigation of Fairness and Altruism Norms in Small-scale Societies"

"Experimental methods in economics have been very useful in my research to help understand social preferences and pro-social behavior among hunter-gatherers and small-scale horticulturalists. Although lacking formal laws and largely divorced from markets and the daily use of money, these individuals respond to incentives and payoffs in familiar ways, and have fully developed informal economies.

For over a decade, I have been trying to understand how and under what conditions people produce and share food, labor and other resources with each other in their daily lives. Much work in behavioral biology relies on direct observations of behavior, which is wonderful, but limits what can be learned. One great contribution of experiments is to standardize a set of exposed conditions amongst people, which then lets us measure responses in a more directly comparable and meaningful way. I have used some classic cooperation experiments to study altruism, punishment and fairness within and among societies.

The methods of experimental economics have helped illuminate the many ways in which the details of situations and social context shape social behavior. For example, a recent experiment played in nine villages revealed substantial variability among villages that was not the result of differences in demographic, socioeconomic and other individual-level factors. Experiments have helped answer and raise new questions about how social dynamics play out in small groups like Tsimane Amerindians, who lack centralized authorities, formal punishment and pro-social norms of etiquette like the kinds we often find in the West.

Experimental methods also help to place disparate populations on the same yardstick for measuring the willingness to help or punish others, from 18-yr old college students to 70-yr old Bolivian hunters. I have been a member of a team of anthropologists who have used economics games to study altruism, punishment and moral outrage across over fifteen populations. It has been productive and fun to bring the methods of experimental economics to the field, and it is my hope that these field experiments, coupled with ethnographic insight from long-term study of these populations, have informed and helped the way economists think about and study pro-sociality."

Bio:
Gurven conducts research in two principal areas: human social behavior and life history evolution. He has studied how members of small-scale societies organize inter-personal relations to solve salient, recurrent economic problems. This includes the sharing of food and labor among foragers and horticulturalists and different forms of assistance during periods of distress and conflict. He has published extensively on the economics of exchange and food production, and on problems of small-scale collective action, based on fieldwork among South American forager-horticulturalist populations.

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