Ultimatums and Deep Status

The question is often asked whether humans are naturally heirachical, or more cooperative. Do we crave status or belonging? It is often assumed that since hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, that we are a naturally egalitarian species. But this article asks poses a different idea. It posits that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, rather than being inherent to humans, is actually an aberration that imposed egalitarianism on a naturally heirarchical species. Because large kills required teamwork, and because the fruits of large kills could not be hoarded, these gave rise to the storied egalitarianism among hunter-gatheres. And tool use provided a levelling effect. But there is little evidence that this is inherent or natural to humans:

Levels of inequality might have fluctuated during our evolutionary past. The last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees — a primate who lived in the rainforests of Africa some five million years ago — was probably as hierarchical as chimps still are today. Alpha male chimps are, basically, big bullies who take what they want and brutally punish junior males who dare to challenge them, and the first hominids were probably similar. Yet, according to the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, all this changed around 500,000 years ago when our ancestors first developed spears. The development of more sophisticated weapons meant that physical strength was no longer decisive in determining the outcome of a fight. Weaker males could now kill stronger ones, enabling the transition to more egalitarian communities in which leadership was more a matter of skilful negotiation and bargaining than simple brute force.

If Boehm is right, it is the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers that is unusual from an evolutionary point of view, a mere phase between the dominance hierarchies of our primate inheritance and the social inequality brought on by the advent of farming. Far from being our natural state, the low levels of inequality in bands of hunter-gatherers might be a fragile achievement resulting from a certain stage of military technology, a temporary truce among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements.

The development of weaponry might also have favoured the transition to egalitarianism by enabling our ancestors to hunt big game. There is far too much meat in a dead bison for one hunter to consume all by himself, so most of it is eaten by others. But the link between meat-sharing and egalitarianism does not pass by way of equal distribution. Some scholars argue that hunter-gatherers do not divide the spoils of the hunt equally among the members of the band as if they were practicing some kind of primitive communism. Rather, those who come back empty-handed snatch scraps of meat from the successful hunter without permission. This is a model of human sharing known as ‘tolerated theft’. The theft is tolerated by the successful hunter only because he is too busy stuffing his own face to punish every transgression. Once again, egalitarianism arises from the difficulty of coercion, not because of fellow feeling or kindred spirit.

And status heirarchies are directly tied to mental health in an evolutionary sense:

According to the social competition hypothesis of depression, humans are exquisitely sensitive to small differences in social status. Such sensitivity was vital when our ancestors lived in smaller bands of hunter-gatherers, where status differences were relatively slight. But in today’s world, where the global elite earn thousands of times more than those at the bottom of the economic heap and have completely different lifestyles, our status detectors go into overdrive. Hence a sensitivity that evolved to help low-status individuals signal obedience would, in today’s world, produce pathological results.

Support for this idea is provided by studies of dominance hierarchies in other primates. Low-ranking vervet monkeys, for example, have serotonin levels that are half those of the alpha males, and low-status yellow baboons have elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Both of these physiological responses are found in depressed people, so perhaps inequality does literally get under our skin. A study of British civil servants found that those in lower-grade jobs showed significantly higher levels of the cortisol-awakening response (the difference between cortisol levels at waking and 30 minutes later, which is thought to be linked to the hippocampus’s preparation to face anticipated stress) than those in higher grades. Contrary to popular belief, then, it seems that those at the top of the pyramid, who tend to have the most decision-making responsibility, have the least stressful lives. One theory is that, the lower one is in the chain of command, the less control one has over one’s daily life. Taking orders, rather than giving them, results in raised heart rate, stress hormones, and blood pressure.

Inequality is not a negative-sum game — in which everybody ends up worse off — but a zero-sum game, in which the poorer health of those at the bottom of the pile is offset by the health gains of those at the top. There is nothing like the sight of a beggar to make one feel rich. It is not enough to succeed, as Gore Vidal said; others must fail.

The ultimatum game, which is often used to test ideas of fairness, actually varies from cuture to culture:

Evolutionary psychologists have also looked to experimental psychology for evidence that we are naturally averse to inequality. In the ultimatum game, for example, two strangers are paired and given a sum of money. One of them — usually referred to as the ‘proposer’ — has to decide how to divide the money. The proposer might suggest a 50-50 split, or they might offer only 10 per cent and keep the lion’s share. The other player can then either accept or reject this offer. If the responder accepts the offer, each player walks away with the share suggested by the proposer. If the responder rejects the offer, each player walks away with nothing.

According to game theory, a rational proposer should always offer the smallest amount possible, and a rational responder should always accept the proposer’s offer, no matter how small it is. After all, some money is better than none. But this isn’t what people actually do when they play this game. Instead of offering the smallest possible amount, most proposers offer between 40 and 50 per cent of the money. And on the few occasions that proposers offer less than 20 per cent, responders reject about half of those offers, despite the fact that this means both lose.

Such findings have been interpreted as evidence that people naturally dislike inequality and will sacrifice some personal gains to avoid it. However, when the experiment has been carried out with indigenous people with a low degree of market integration, the results are very different. Machiguenga farmers in Peru, for example, offer very little, and accept almost every offer, no matter how derisory. In the cultures least exposed to the influence of capitalism, people behave almost as greedily as game theory suggests they should. This does not bode well for the idea that inequality aversion is part of our DNA.

This is confirmed by this article about the role of culture in human evolution:

Evolutionary psychologists have also looked to experimental psychology for evidence that we are naturally averse to inequality. In the ultimatum game, for example, two strangers are paired and given a sum of money. One of them — usually referred to as the ‘proposer’ — has to decide how to divide the money. The proposer might suggest a 50-50 split, or they might offer only 10 per cent and keep the lion’s share. The other player can then either accept or reject this offer. If the responder accepts the offer, each player walks away with the share suggested by the proposer. If the responder rejects the offer, each player walks away with nothing.

According to game theory, a rational proposer should always offer the smallest amount possible, and a rational responder should always accept the proposer’s offer, no matter how small it is. After all, some money is better than none. But this isn’t what people actually do when they play this game. Instead of offering the smallest possible amount, most proposers offer between 40 and 50 per cent of the money. And on the few occasions that proposers offer less than 20 per cent, responders reject about half of those offers, despite the fact that this means both lose.

Such findings have been interpreted as evidence that people naturally dislike inequality and will sacrifice some personal gains to avoid it. However, when the experiment has been carried out with indigenous people with a low degree of market integration, the results are very different. Machiguenga farmers in Peru, for example, offer very little, and accept almost every offer, no matter how derisory. In the cultures least exposed to the influence of capitalism, people behave almost as greedily as game theory suggests they should. This does not bode well for the idea that inequality aversion is part of our DNA.
There was large discussion about methods, about whether we could actually pull this off, and then over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games—not systemically across the societies— but it gave us insight that we would then later use, and what we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.

We found we were able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration. More market-integrated societies offered more, and less market integrated societies offered less. But also, there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers. Societies with more cooperative institutions offered more, and these were independent effects.

This then led to a subsequent project where we measured market integration much more carefully along with a large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion. We did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.

In the Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game. They're allotted a sum of money, say $100, and the first player can offer any portion of the $100 to the second player, player B. Now, player B in this game can't do anything, and they just get whatever they're offered. But there is a third player, player C, and player C is given half the amount that A and B are dividing up, and he can use some of his money (20 percent of it actually) to pay to take money away from A at three times the rate. If he's given $50, he can use $10 of it to take $30 away from player A. Suppose player A gives only $10 to player B and keeps $90 for himself, then player B will go home with $10. Now, player C can pay $10, so he goes home with $40 instead of $50 in order to take $30 away from player A. Player A would go home with $60 instead of $90, because he got punished. Player B goes home with $10, and player C goes home with $40 instead of $50 because he chose to punish.

This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers, ephemeral interactions—people that you don't know and won't see again. In the experiment, one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game, and then this Third Party Punishment measure, and it gives us three measures of fairness in this kind of transaction. It gives us offers in all three games and what we found there is that market integration again predicts higher offers in all three games, and size of the community predicts willingness to punish and this fits with a lot of theoretical work, suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment. You don't need costly punishment. You need some kind of sanctioning system to keep people in line, but you're probably not going to do it with single individuals punishing. You have some other mechanism. It could be some kind of reputational mechanism like if they don't cooperate in this situation, then you won't interact with them in some other situation. It's a withdrawal of interaction rather than direct punishment. There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.

In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.
This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative. This is true, but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances. Hunter-gatherers are famous for being great at food sharing, but these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers, and to make a large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.