Egalitarian motives in humans

Abstract

Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others' incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behaviour has the effect of promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear: punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be distinguished from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others' incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners' incomes and to increase below-average earners' incomes. The results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income-altering behaviours, and may therefore be an important factor underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity and, hence, cooperation in humans.

Punish or perish? Retaliation and collaboration among humans

“…Recently, the Public Good experiment with Punishment was repeated, with the difference that the first stage (public good) was replaced by a lottery [63]. Players received randomly assigned sums (distributed as in the Fehr-Gächter experiment [4]) and then could inflict costly 'punishment' just as before, except that they were fully aware that their coplayers had done nothing wrong.…”

Young children, but not chimpanzees, are averse to disadvantageous and advantageous inequities

“…It is an even more striking fact that humans consider a given amount of resources perfectly satisfactory unless someone else gets less, in which case again they often find that amount unsatisfactory. In the language of economics, humans are averse to inequity-in both advantageous and disadvantageous directions (e.g., Dawes, Fowler, Johnson, McElreath, & Smirnov, 2007;Fehr & Schmidt, 1999).…”

La teoría de juegos conductual, el dilema del viajero alternativo y la maximización de pagos

“…Otra posible interpretación de este resultado es que los agentes, además de evitar el castigo y ganar el premio, hayan intentado también satisfacer el objetivo de ganar más dinero que la otra persona, lo cual los impulsaba a no bajar demasiado sus elecciones. Un grupo importante, aunque menor (alrededor del 35%), elige exactamente el mismo número que el otro participante, probablemente con alguna motivación de tipo igualitarista, lo cual se ha registrado en otros juegos como el ultimátum (Dawes et al, 2007). Otra posible interpretación para el comportamiento de este grupo es que sean del grupo competitivo que simplemente quieren evitar el castigo, aunque sin por eso sacrificar en demasía su ganancia monetaria.…”