Level-Headed:
Economics Experiment Finds Taste for Equality
April 11, 2007
By Inga Kiderra
The rich don’t get richer – at least not in laboratory games. According to a new study of behavioral economics, published in the April 12, 2007 issue of Nature, people will spend their own money to make the rich less rich and the poor less poor. They do so without any hope of personal gain, acting, it seems, out of a taste for equality and sense of fair play.
Earlier research has demonstrated that people are willing to incur costs to punish and reward others, especially in scenarios where every player’s contribution to a common pool results in greater benefits for all. But in those cases it is hard to tell whether the actions are motivated by egalitarian preferences for similar income levels or a desire to enforce norms and encourage group cooperation.
So James Fowler, associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, doctoral student Christopher Dawes and their coauthors set up a game to see if there’s a drive for equality.
The results suggest that a form of material egalitarianism is more than just a long-held ideal of utopian philosophers and political theorists. With not only self-interest but also group cooperation removed as factors, people still, at a cost to themselves, gave money to the poorest players and took it away from the richest.
Fowler and colleagues believe that their experiment shows that egalitarian motives, to some extent, underlie the evolution of cooperation and reciprocity in humans.
“One of the reasons we cooperate may be because we care about equality,” Fowler said.
Real-world analogues for egalitarian preferences, said Fowler, can be seen in the wide acceptance of a progressive tax and a social welfare net.
“If people didn’t have a taste for equality, then I would expect the world would be even more unequal than it is,” he said. “It has not been fully appreciated yet how much people are willing to level the playing field and how much this determines our ability to cooperate with each other.”
A total of 120 volunteers took part in the experiment over six sessions, playing the game five times in groups of four. Group composition changed with each game and players’ game histories did not follow them. In other words, reputation and retribution were not allowed to play a role.
Participants were randomly allocated different sums of money. They were shown what each player got and presented with a choice to do nothing and maintain the (unequal) status quo or to reduce their own real takeaway pay by one monetary unit in order to either increase or reduce another player’s income by three units. Outcomes of each game were then displayed.
In all, income alteration was frequent: About three-quarters of participants reduced or increased another player’s income at least once and about a third did so five times or more.
Subjects who had received more than the group average were penalized most frequently and most heavily, at a rate of about three-quarters of a unit for each unit above the average. In contrast, those that started out with considerably less than the others got sizeable gifts, at rate of about eight-tenths of a unit for each unit below the average.
The pattern of behaviors had the effect of equalizing income. It also did not change as players gained experience with the game (and so could clearly see that there really was nothing to be gained from their costly actions). Furthermore, it didn’t seem to matter whether individuals had themselves been the targets of an increase or reduction in the previous round: They continued acting as they had, either redistributing winnings according to apparently egalitarian principles or, as was the case with a minority, concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.
The researchers capped their experiment with a questionnaire designed to elicit emotional reactions. Players expressed the greatest levels of annoyance and anger in a hypothetical situation where one player got far more than they had. And the players who felt this way the strongest spent more to equalize the distribution.
In related research, Fowler has shown that game behavior correlates with people’s political participation. Those that engage in costly giving and taking in a game tend to also be registered with a major political party and to vote at greater rates.
“The ‘Robin Hood impulse’ people display in the lab,” Fowler said, “appears to translate into good citizenship out in the world.”
Coauthors on the Nature paper are Tim Johnson, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Stanford University, Richard McElreath, of UC Davis, and Oleg Smirnov, of the University of Miami.
The research was supported by the Center for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the UC Davis Institute of Government Affairs.
5 comments:
If this is universaly true, or let's say universaly true in all americanized cultures, it would seem strange that only a few nations, and not all, have adapted official national policies, such as progressive income taxing, and other social democratic policies, that would help this cause. Could one interpret this as "evidence" that in those nations the majority have little power, and that a small elite has managed to secure their position too well.
Games are bizarre. Why do people many times organize competition events, and then after make sure that nobody looses. Sc. "friendly" matches etc. Perhaps the motivation comes not from creating a difference, hierachy, between the people, rather an equality and sense of community, but differentiating, reifying the values that are considered desireable and not for the community.
It would be interesting to see this game that the professor and his associates had devised, because just perhaps, some decisions in it are linked to other things that have strong meaning in that society like "family". Giving money to either the poor man or the rich man becomes a different situation if one of them has a family, etc.
Well, I guess the thesis that I would advance, in short, is that yes, I do think that there is a universal tendency to try to get along, because, as humans, we are incredibly independent. As humans, however, we have different spheres of identity. So we have our individual identity, our family identity, national identity among others. All of which can be manipulated. And the list doesn't end there. For example, you can have a racial identity, religious identity and if anyone has ever known or been to the South (of the United States) a regional identity. Thus, these identities can be easily constructed into an "Us" vs. "Them" paradigm, which utilized throughout history. And because we are social beings we tend to work is systems to defend that system in which we are a part, and which gives us sustenance, even if we are at the bottom of the rung. So poor people DO NOT often engage in revolutions, slaves DO NOT often revolt, and so on. At the other end, however, you often have ideologies that control power, such as religious institutions and even law. And sadly, these tend to attract "Authoritarians" as the term is developed by Bob Altemeyer. Thus, certain authoritarians can not only struggle to reach the top of the pinnacles for power, but often manipulate ideologies in order to restrict natural tendencies of working together, thus maintaining their secure place. And because people are inherently willing and wanting to believe in the system, any system, it is not surprising that societies change very, very slowly, and that legal and religious institutions often stifle rather then promote any social change.
But I think that the issues that you have spoken about, especially in the third paragraph, refer to the different identities that we all have. But as I said, the thesis that I have constructed obviously takes a bit more support than I can set forth here. But I think that this study taps into our genetic predisposition to cooperate with each other. Thus, babies not only are completely helpless and require attending by others for years, but ALL of us physiologically respond to a baby's cry with the need to attend to its needs, pretty irrespective of whether the baby is biologically ours or not.
This is truly interesting, weaz, and a bit encouraging about human impulses. It makes me wonder then, about manifest inequity in the world at large. My immediate thought has to do with wealthy elites using power to maintain power, though it seems almost redundant to say so. I look forward to the fruits of your labors.
I guess I was trying to hint at a functional sociological explanation, (Durkheim or something) that, let say, voting for a totalitarian leader, is not necessarily in contradiction with "the universal disposition of man towards equality" if they do so with the intention of reinforcing the "good" values of that society and thus creating what Durkheim called "cohesiveness".
Of course, this arguement, relies on the idea that in the game people act to achieve equality in some specific cases, because generally the seek "cohesiveness". Many times equality is analoguous to it, but maybe not always?
Well, I definitely think laid the foundation for much of the work that would be done, and the similarities of trying to understand the psychological function of religion and the coherence of society certainly is a common theme. But the people who I would say that my work is relying upon in a more direct sense would be John Jost, and his fellow group of researchers, and the work done by Marilyn Brewer. I also think the work done by Bob Altemeyer is helpful, but I think that Jost has advanced Altemeyer's work even beyond. What psychologists (and sociologists) tend to overlook however is the role that Law plays in manipulating people and providing much of the same functions as religion. A lot of interesting work has been done by the Italian Emilio Gentile on "political religions", but in my opinion each field operates within its own sphere with little discussion of the applicability of certain principles across disciplines. Throw in the very important work done by Brian Tamanaha on the current use of law as an instrument (his last two books are quite powerful), and you have much of the seeds of a synthesis that I am trying to pull off.
But Ktony, I don't think there is much to be optimistic about, at least in the mid term. In my opinion, we would have to almost create a new kind of person and new kind of society to break away from the almost genetic gravitational impulses pulling us towards conformity and obedience to authority. But I am at least going to try to explain why the forces are so strong, who wields them and hopefully what it might take to break them (though my pessimism suggests that it is really not likely to happen).
So my bottom line (but won't likely be spelled out so clearly in my work), is that in our current state we are headed towards extinction, because it is our "faith" in each other that is causing us to blindly accept people and ideologies whose track records are close to appalling.
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