For Really Fair People, Try Wal-Mart

Here’s the (wrong) way I thought the world worked:

In families, people are selfless. People help each other, sacrifice for each other, want the best for each other. In small tribes or clans, then, family-like solidarity would encourage the same sort of benevolence; at the very least, members would be unwilling to cheat each other. A tiny village seems likely to pursue common welfare, mutual gain, fairness.

In large capitalist communities, on the other hand, people are anonymous, and anonymity decreases accountability. No one knows or cares about anyone else; people are inherently more selfish, and that’s exactly why markets work.

A series of experiments in the current issue of Science played a game with 2,000 people in communities all over the world to prove me wrong; John Tierney summarizes them in the New York Times.

It was a simple game. The prize was equivalent to a day’s salary. One player, the “dictator,” had two options: to keep the entire prize, or to share part of it with another unidentified player. Only the researcher would know the dictator’s identity.

The hunter-gatherers, foragers, and subsistence farmers – those who lived in the smallest communities – gave away less than a quarter of the prize. When given the option, players didn’t choose to punish the “dictator” that had stiffed them. Large communities of Missourians, on the other hand, gave away over 45% of their prize and were so offended by selfishness that they would punish it even if it cost them money.

Why? Organized religion plays a part – while small tribes practice local religions, large communities have traditionally favored “those religious systems that galvanize pro-social behavior…perhaps using both supernatural incentives (for example, hell) and recurrent rituals that intensify group solidarity.”

More importantly, though, is the level of “market integration” in a community; in other words, the centrality of and reliance upon grocery stores. The study illustrated that those who purchased their food overwhelmingly shared their prizes. Those who found it, grew it, caught it, or shot it overwhelmingly didn’t. 

Wal-Mart provides our moral education! For Wal-Mart to function at all, we’ve had to establish market norms that promote general levels of fairness, trust, and cooperation…with strangers. Hence, morality. Go capitalism.

–Trisha Jain