Cooperation in an Uncertain World: For the Maasai of East Africa, Need-Based Transfers Outperform Account-Keeping in Volatile Environments

Aktipis, C. Athena; Aguiar, Rolando de; Flaherty, Anna; Iyer, Padmini; Sonkoi, Dennis; Cronk, Lee

doi:10.1007/s10745-016-9823-z

Cited by 66 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Individuals help one another only when it is mutually advantageous, that is when the cost of helping is less than the benefit of being helped. Additionally, recent evolutionary modellings of risk pooling have revealed the socially optimal nature of helping behaviours [2,5,36,42,60]. They have shown that people's systems of mutual help correspond to the most efficient systems of risk pooling in a volatile environment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why cooperation is not running away

Geoffroy

Baumard

André

2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why cooperation is not running away

Geoffroy

Baumard

André

2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The unpredictability of such situations makes them similar to the kinds of situations in which one might buy an insurance policy. The norms found at many sites may thus be proximate cultural instantiations of this more distal adaptive logic of risk pooling through transfers to those in need (Aktipis et al ; Cronk et al, forthcoming). In others, balanced reciprocity (i.e., direct payback for water) was sometimes expected.…”

Section: Implications Limitations and Next Stepsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Water sharing, reciprocity, and need: A comparative study of interhousehold water transfers in sub‐Saharan Africa

Brewis

Rosinger

Wutich

et al. 2019

Economic Anthropology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Water sharing between households could crucially mitigate short‐term household water shortages, yet it is a vastly understudied phenomenon. Here we use comparative survey data from eight sites in seven sub‐Saharan African countries (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda) to answer three questions: With whom do households share water? What is expected in return? And what roles do need and affordability play in shaping those transfers? We find that water is shared predominantly between neighbors, that transfers are more frequent when water is less available and less affordable, and that most sharing occurs with no expectation of direct payback. These findings identify water sharing, as a form of generalized reciprocity, to be a basic and consistent household coping strategy against shortages and unaffordability of water in sub‐Saharan Africa.

show abstract

“…Ethnographically, better-off foragers tend to share with needy band-mates (28). This forms a system of mutual assistance that minimizes the risk that individuals and families temporarily encountering a string of bad luck will die from need (29,30). These patterns appear to be generated by a universal psychology of sharing that was naturally selected over evolutionary time by the payoff structure of this enduring game.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

Seal

Sell

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.[M]ore recently the "Greatest happiness principle" has been brought prominently forward. It is, however, more correct to speak of the latter principle as the standard, and not as the motive of conduct.-Charles Darwin (1) W hy do people support social policies? One level of explanation addresses properties of populations that individual minds might process-local practices, shared beliefs and ideologies, collective identities, and recent history (2). A second, independent level of explanation asks which specific psychological mechanisms participate in forming the individual's response to a policy-that is, what interpretive, emotional, and motivational systems are activated by external inputs, shaping the response (3, 4). Here, we explore this second level of explanation. We investigate several evolved psychological mechanisms to see to what degree they pattern the individual's response to economic redistribution. We also investigate the extent to which a taste for fairness shapes support for redistribution.By economic redistribution, we mean the modification of a distribution of resources across a population as the result of a political process. In the case of progressive redistribution (henceforth, redistribution)-a policy for which there is large worldwide demand (5, 6)-the ostensible group-level goal is to even out a skewed statistical distribution by transferring resources from the better off to the less well off. However, it is possible that the public rationale for supporting a policy is distinct from the private or even nonconscious motives of individuals supporting (or opposing) it. It is important to recognize that such a transformation in the distribution of resources does not necessarily entail conservation of a fixed and ...

show abstract

Cooperation in an Uncertain World: For the Maasai of East Africa, Need-Based Transfers Outperform Account-Keeping in Volatile Environments

Cited by 66 publications

References 28 publications

Why cooperation is not running away

Why cooperation is not running away

Water sharing, reciprocity, and need: A comparative study of interhousehold water transfers in sub‐Saharan Africa

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About