The Tsimane' Rarely Punish: An Experimental Investigation of Dictators, Ultimatums, and Punishment

W a revised, standardized set of protocols, the Roots of Human Sociality Project examined whether prior “anomalies” not predicted by any of the available social preference models would reappear in the second round of games played in fifteen small-scale cultures. If they did, we could be more confident that the initial results were robust and not artifacts of an inconsistent methodology. Furthermore, the non-industrialized environmental settings characteristic of the fifteen cultures, with varying degrees of market integration, would allow for a serious treatment of the role of culture, the development, maintenance, and evolution of social norms, and the effects of market access and integration on prosocial behavior (see chapter 2). In this second round of games, with a systematic set of variables measuring different aspects of market access and integration, we were able to examine whether integration, acculturation, and experience with anonymous others in market settings leads to the more uniform and modal patterns of game behavior seen in industrialized societies. Adding the third-party punishment game to the repertoire and applying the strategy method to the ultimatum game gave us greater insight into responder behavior and therefore into second-party and third-party punishment of perceived cooperative norm violations as well. The results of these new games have important implications for our understanding of how reciprocal altruism and other models of cooperation operate in natural populations and how different social preferences lead to variable game behavior in different contexts (see, for example, Bolton and Ockenfels 2000; Charness and Rabin 2002; Falk and Fischbacher 2000; Fehr and Schmidt 1999; Rabin 1993). Finally, the inclusion of follow-up interviews of selected game players provides additional ethnographic insight into how players viewed the games and their expectations of others’ game behavior. Only through ethnographic interviews can we understand the links between emotional responses to specific situations, the internalized norms brought to bear on emotions and behavior, and individuals’ actual behavioral choices. This chapter examines the strategy method ultimatum game (UG), the dictator game (DG), and the third-party punishment game (TPG) as played among the Tsimane' of Bolivia. By allowing Chapter 8