History , and Guide to the Volume

T work represents the second volume emerging from a collaboration among about two dozen anthropologists and economists that began in 1997. Our goal in this volume is to shed light on the historical emergence of prosocial norms and their relationship to economic growth. By contrast with other primates, how is it that human societies manage to solve problems collectively and entice individuals to operate against their own narrow, short-term, economic self-interest and instead engage in behavior that benefits the group as a whole, or some significant subset? We argue that understanding the origins of such prosocial behavior, including the willingness to pay a price to punish those who violate such norms, is a necessary condition prior to the ability to live in large social groups with complex divisions of labor. Life in larger concentrations is in turn essential to economic growth and productivity, thus affording higher economic well-being. To approach this question, we have integrated analytical and methodological approaches from experimental economics with the richness, context, and depth of anthropological field ethnography. Our team has administered the same economic experiments, according to controlled protocols, in highly diverse societies around the world that live with different levels of sociopolitical complexity and involvement in the market economy. We have sought to interpret our findings in light of how daily life operates in these diverse locales. The purpose is to understand how the behavioral differences that we observe in the economic experiments map across the substantial spectrum of the societies that we sampled. Ultimately, by tapping the extant global diversity, our efforts begin to illuminate the mechanisms behind the coevolution of social norms, economic growth, and the emergence of complex societies (see chapter 2). Our sample includes hunter-gatherers, slash-and-burn horticulturalists, livestock herders, fisherfolk, cash-cropping farmers, and wage laborers in industrialized societies. We have also drawn from an impressive geographical distribution that spans Africa, South America, Papua New Guinea, Siberia, Oceania, and North America. We employ economic experiments in this endeavor because they provide a scientifically rigorous method to get a handle on otherwise squishy socioeconomic phenomena, which can be challenging to measure and compare. This approach involves playing games for nontrivial sums of real money. In a sense, this is a real economic decision, albeit in an unfamiliar situation. The use of nontrivial sums of money in a stark, simple decision situation has practical, ethical, and scientific advantages that we discuss in greater detail in later chapters. In brief, this serves to increase participation (allowing us to obtain representative samples), focuses the participant’s mind on the task, and suppresses the kind of “cheap talk” that one often gets with similar “what Chapter 1