“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model - based on self-interest - fails in…

• UO
  University of Pennsylvania
• EU
  Emory University
• CI
  California Institute of Technology
• HU
  Harvard University
• SF
  Santa Fe Institute
• UD
  Università degli Studi di Siena
• UO
  University of Oxford
• CE
  Central European University
• UZ
  Universität Zürich
• UO
  University of California, Los Angeles
• UO
  University of California, Davis
• CS
  California State University, Fullerton