OCT 12

14: OCT 12: Some Cultural Evolutionary Theory

Assigned

• Henrich, part 2 (38-58)
• Sapolsky, Chapter 13, "Culture, context, public goods games, religion" (493-503) (10)

In-Class Topics

• Desert and the Social Contract - Small Group Exercise
• Cultural Relativism, Universalism, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Libertarian v Rawlsian Social Contracts

• Rawls: It wouldn't be rational for you to risk a social contract in which you are worse off for morally arbitrary conditions (deadbeat parents, sickness, low skills or intelligence, homelessness, etc.). Given the uncertainty of where you might wind up once the veil is lifted, a "rational risk" would be to give up some of your "winnings" (if you were in the most advantaged class), in return for the "insurance" of your well-being if you are in the worst off class.

• Libertarians: It's not my fault if you have problems like bad health or not much of a way to earn a living, and making me help you with them is coercive to me. From my perspective, it's quite arbitrary when government invents new projects or identifies more groups of people to help.

• This looks like an un-resolvable tension, but let's see how the social contract model can help us with it. Would it be rational for the libertarian to take a chance on a libertarian social contract? Would we place a guarantee of formal liberty above all other possible outcomes?

• Let's make a list of situations in which we "favor the worst off" (at least by supplying help for people to secure particular goods)

• How would you respond to someone who objected, on Libertarian grounds, to the fairness of the following? Can you think of both liberal and conservative ways to respond?:

• Paying to educate other people's kids. (An original objection to mandatory education in the US.)
• Helping first time homeowners with federally insured mortgages.
• Disability payments to individuals who have significant disabilities affecting their ability to work.
• Housing guarantees (other countries do this more) for people who are homeless.
• Student and senior discounts on many things, from concerts to gym memberships.
• Giving disabled people good parking, among other accomodations.
• Public works like Riverfront Park, subsidies to get the downtown shopping mall, the cool concrete pedestrian bridge over the railroad?

• How might a conservative embrace Rawlsian thinking?

Sapolsky, Chapter 13,"Culture, context, public goods games, religion" (493-520)

• Context, Culture, and Moral Universals

• given all of the ways our moral judgements can be altered by context and culture, are there universals? Some forms of murder, theft, and sexual misbehavior. The Golden Rule is nearly universal. (Note that it is a basic fairness doctrine and that it’s “indexed” to a view of human nature. Consider again the passenger’s dilemma.)

• Schweder. autonomy,community, divinity
• Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory. (A “matrix” is already a way of thinking about “general variables”.)

• Cooperation and Competition in Public Goods Game research

• Public goods game research - review experimental model p. 495. Should remind you a bit of Prisoner’s Dilemma, uncertainty is a problem in both cases. Important 2008 research result: Rational choice theory predicts zero contribution to public good. But, research documents consistent prosociality, with some variation by culture.

• Simple version: sucker's payoff reduces cooperation to zero
• Punishment version: Robust pro-social results:

• 1. Everyone is somewhat prosocial. In no culture do people just not contribute.
• 2. In all cultures, people punish low contributors. (Prosocial or altruistic Punishment)

• Interesting recent result: Anti-social punishment is also universal, though it's strength varies. Interestingly, the lower the social capital in a country, the higher the rates of antisocial punishment. (Another way to theorize this result - We lose “face” or experience hierarchy in the presence of overly generous people. Not a problem in individualist cultures so much.)

• Other Public Good research:

• The Dictator Game (a simple measure of fairness) (Ultimatum game without the option to refuse the division of goods).
• Two versions of the Ultimatum Game. One with “pay to punish” option. One with 3rd party punishment option.

• Results: Variables that predict prosocial patterns of play: market integration predicts more pro social behavior (higher offers in Dictator and Ultimatum), community size (more 2nd and 3rd party punishment), religion (predicts great 2nd and 3rd party punishment). 498. Point: We are seeing culturally evolved “mental adaptations” in these results.

• World Religions and Moralizing Gods

• What is the connection between participation in world religion and prosocial play? 499: When groups get large enough to interact with strangers, they invent moralizing gods (research from Chapter 9). The large global religions all have moralizing gods who engage in third party punishment. So we do. Still. Think about that. (We’ll read a couple of pages from “The WEIRDEST People in the World on this later.)

• Explaining Public Goods Game Results499: Two hypotheses:

• 1. Our sense of fairness is an extension of a deep past in which sociality was based on kin and near kin. (don't forget monkey fairness) or,
• 2. Fairness is a cultural artifact (product of culture) that comes from reasoning about the implications of larger groups size. Looks more plausible now to say both.

• Note theoretical puzzle on p. 500: You might expect small kin-based communities to have higher offers in PG games, punishing unfairnes, but "impersonal prosociality" and "impersonal fairness" are really part of a different "cooperative toolkit". In a way, the “market toolkit” is much simpler than a small group situation. “You give me this now, and I pay you now.”

• Honor and Revenge - (mention Mediterranean hypothesis - Italian honor culture & research on southerners....) 501

• Shamed Collectivists v. Guilty Individualists 501

• more likely to sacrifice welfare of one for group. Use individual as means to end. focus of moral imperatives on social roles and duties vs. rights.
• uses shames vs. guilt. read 502. shame cultures viewed as primitive, but contemporary advocates of shaming. thoughts?....examples p. 503.
• gossip as tool of shaming -- as much as 2/3 of conversation and mostly negative.

• Fools Rush In -- Reason and Intuition p. 504

• How do we use insights from research to improve behavior?
• Which moral theory is best? (trick question). In this section, he's

• Virtue theory looks outdated, but maybe more relevant than we think.
• reviews the point from trolley research about the utilitarian answer from the dlPFC and the nonutilitariain from the vmPFC. Why would we be automatically non-utilitarian? One answer: nature isn't trying to make us happy, it's try to get our genes into the next generation.
• Moral heterogeneity - new data: 30% deontologist and 30% utilitarian in both conditions. 40% swing vote, context sensitive. theorize about that.
• Major criticism of utilitarian - most rational, but not practical unless you don't have a vmPFC. "I kinda like my liver". Triggers concerns that you might be sacrificed for the greater happiness.

• Sapolsky claims that optimal decisions involve integration of reason and intuition. 508:"Our moral intuitions are neither primordial nor reflexively primitive....[but] cognitive conclusions from experience. morality is a dual process, partitioned between structures for reasoning and intuition. (Note that both processes are cognitive. Intuition sometimes called "automatic inference" in both how they emerge and are applied. Saying "thank you".)

• Slow vs. Fast

• More Josh Greene research. Old problem: tragedy of the commons -- how do you jumpstart cooperation. It's a "me vs us" problem. But there's an "us versus them" version when there are two groups (cultures) with competing models for thriving.

• Tragedy of Commonsense Morality (a group version of what I call The Paradox of Moral Experience). It's really hard not to conclude that your way of doing something isn't just culturally contingent, but really true.

• Example of Tragedy of commonsense morality using Dog meat. -- used as example of how you could induce us vs. them response.

• Example of framing: Samuel Bowles example of switching people's mind set in the case of the school responding to late parents.

• Veracity and Mendacity

• Note range of questions 512. Truth telling not a simple policy matter.
• Primate duplicity -- capuchin monkeys will distract a higher ranking member to take food, but not a lower one.
• Male gelada baboons know when to hold off on the "copulation call"
• Differences with humans: we feel bad or morally soiled about lying and we can believe our own lies.

• Human resources for lying -- poker face, finesse, dlPFC comes in with both struggle to resist lying and execution of strategic lie.
• Neuroplasticity in white and gray matter in habitual liars. 516. Compulsive liars have more white matter in their brains.
• 517: Swiss research (Baumgartner et al) -- playing a trust game allowing for deception, a pattern of brain activation predicted promise breaking. Think of a time when you broke a promise..... Did it feel like what S is describing? A noisy brain cut off by a decision. (Good example of cognitive dissonance.)

• Subjects who don't cheat. will vs. grace. grace wins. "I don't know; I just don't cheat."