Risk and the evolution of human exchange

Kaplan, Hillard; Schniter, Eric; Smith, Vernon L.; Wilson, Bart J.

doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.2614

Cited by 88 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Although no formal tests of consumption smoothing exist for Arctic communities, risk pooling is one explanation for the extensive food sharing observed in similar hunter-gatherer societies (Kaplan et al 1985(Kaplan et al , 2012). …”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, we added a treatment that tests whether perfectly enforced sharing commitments affect decisions about the level of participation in the group activity. Several experimental studies of risk pooling focused on the sharing of gains from a lottery Genicot 2008, Attanasio et al 2012), but very few (Erkal et al 2011, Kaplan et al 2012) allowed subjects to pool negative shocks through sharing or some other mechanism. Finally, we are unaware of any studies that investigated the pooling of idiosyncratic risk in a social dilemma and the resulting effects on cooperation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They varied levels of commitment and found that limiting commitment reduced the frequency with which individuals pool earnings from the gamble. Kaplan et al (2012) used a series of laboratory experiments to test whether resource sharing could be explained by risk-sharing motivations versus other alternatives. They found strong evidence for risk-pooling motivations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sharing as risk pooling in a social dilemma experiment

Cherry¹,

Howe²,

Murphy³

2015

E&S

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ABSTRACT. In rural economies with missing or incomplete markets, idiosyncratic risk is frequently pooled through informal networks. Idiosyncratic shocks, however, are not limited to private goods but can also restrict an individual from partaking in or benefiting from a collective activity. In these situations, a group must decide whether to provide insurance to the affected member. We describe results of a laboratory experiment designed to test whether a simple sharing institution can sustain risk pooling in a social dilemma with idiosyncratic risk. We tested whether risk could be pooled without a commitment device and, separately, whether effective risk pooling induced greater cooperation in the social dilemma. We found that even in the absence of a commitment device or reputational considerations, subjects voluntarily pooled risk, thereby reducing variance in individual earnings. In spite of effective risk pooling, however, cooperation in the social dilemma was unaffected.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sharing as risk pooling in a social dilemma experiment

Cherry¹,

Howe²,

Murphy³

2015

E&S

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“…Ancestrally, sharing resources that came in unsynchronized, high-variance, large packages (e.g., large game) allowed individuals to buffer each other's shortfalls at low additional cost. Accordingly, people are more inclined to share under these conditions than under low-variance conditions (19)(20)(21), where need implies low effort instead. Additionally, as predicted by the forager risk-pooling hypothesis, individual and national differences in support for welfare is accounted for by differences in beliefs about whether the unemployed are unlucky or caused their unemployment by low effort (10,22,23).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

Seal

Sell

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.[M]ore recently the "Greatest happiness principle" has been brought prominently forward. It is, however, more correct to speak of the latter principle as the standard, and not as the motive of conduct.-Charles Darwin (1) W hy do people support social policies? One level of explanation addresses properties of populations that individual minds might process-local practices, shared beliefs and ideologies, collective identities, and recent history (2). A second, independent level of explanation asks which specific psychological mechanisms participate in forming the individual's response to a policy-that is, what interpretive, emotional, and motivational systems are activated by external inputs, shaping the response (3, 4). Here, we explore this second level of explanation. We investigate several evolved psychological mechanisms to see to what degree they pattern the individual's response to economic redistribution. We also investigate the extent to which a taste for fairness shapes support for redistribution.By economic redistribution, we mean the modification of a distribution of resources across a population as the result of a political process. In the case of progressive redistribution (henceforth, redistribution)-a policy for which there is large worldwide demand (5, 6)-the ostensible group-level goal is to even out a skewed statistical distribution by transferring resources from the better off to the less well off. However, it is possible that the public rationale for supporting a policy is distinct from the private or even nonconscious motives of individuals supporting (or opposing) it. It is important to recognize that such a transformation in the distribution of resources does not necessarily entail conservation of a fixed and ...

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“…Sometimes unexpected opportunities for repeated exchange with previously cooperative or uncooperative partners arise 2 . Once exchange histories establish, partners with mutually beneficial non-binding agreements often reap gains from iterated trust-based trade with one another (Cochard et al, 2004;Boero et al, 2009;Kaplan et al, 2012). However, investors ceding resources (in anticipation of desired returns) remain subject to various kinds of exploitation by previously trusted partners.…”

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confidence: 99%

Predictable and Predictive Emotions: Explaining Cheap Signals and Trust Re-Extension

Schniter

Sheremeta

2014

SSRN Journal

Self Cite

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Despite normative predictions from economics and biology, unrelated strangers will often develop the trust necessary to reap gains from one-shot economic exchange opportunities. This appears to be especially true when declared intentions and emotions can be cheaply communicated. Perhaps even more puzzling to economists and biologists is the observation that anonymous and unrelated individuals, known to have breached trust, often make effective use of cheap signals, such as promises and apologies, to encourage trust re-extension. We used a pair of trust games with one-way communication and an emotion survey to investigate the role of emotions in regulating the propensity to message, apologize, re-extend trust, and demonstrate trustworthiness. This design allowed us to observe the endogenous emergence and natural distribution of trust-relevant behaviors, remedial strategies used by promise-breakers, their effects on behavior, and subsequent outcomes. We found that emotions triggered by interaction outcomes are predictable and also predict subsequent apology and trust re-extension. The role of emotions in behavioral regulation helps explain why messages are produced, when they can be trusted, and when trust will be re-extended.Keywords: emotion, cheap signal, promise, apology, trust game, reciprocity, experiment INTRODUCTIONIn this paper, we explore the role of positive emotions (pride, believability, appreciation, contentment, cheerfulness, happiness) and negative emotions (guilt, shame, anger, disgust, aggravation, frustration) in regulating cheap signaling, trust re-extension, and trustworthy behavior in the wake of a veiled trust-based interaction between strangers with no explicit indication of certain expectation for repeated interaction 1 . Interactions with 1 A number of other behavioral economic studies have also used veiled designs where interacting participants are unaware of opportunity for repeated interaction(s) that will later be made available (e.g., see Binmore et al., 1985;Burnham et al., 2000;Ellingsen et al., 2010;Gambetta and Székely, 2014). Ellingsen et al. (2010, p. 96) discuss why the veiled design avoiding deception by commission does not violate the non-deception norm in behavioral economic experiments and why withholding procedural information may serve to limit undesirable experimenter demand. Nevertheless, because there is no clear agreement among economists as to what kinds of deception are taboo (see survey results by Krawczyk, 2013 and discussion by Wilson, 2014), deception by omission remains a potential concern with our design. Veiled designs may create negative externality in that the next time participants return to the laboratory to participate in other studies, they may question whether they should anticipate unannounced tasks or interactions, unless the instructions explicitly exclude such a possibility (see also Davis and Holt, 1993, pp. 23-24;Wilson, 2014). It is unlikely that our design produced these externalities, however, as we followed the procedural norm for conducting...

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Risk and the evolution of human exchange

Cited by 88 publications

References 19 publications

Sharing as risk pooling in a social dilemma experiment

Sharing as risk pooling in a social dilemma experiment

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Predictable and Predictive Emotions: Explaining Cheap Signals and Trust Re-Extension

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