scientificamerican | In every financial transaction–whether you’re selling a car, paying
employees, or repackaging commodity futures as financial
derivatives–there are ethical calculations that influence economic
activity beyond the price. Sure, you can cheat a potential buyer and not
mention that your 1996 Ford Mustang GT has a cracked engine block, in
the same way that your boss can stiff you on overtime. If you get away
with it you will succeed in making a short-term gain or see a bump in
the next quarterly earnings report. But, if you eventually develop the
reputation as someone who consistently defrauds the people you do
business with, there is a good chance that the value of your net worth
will be as negative as the moral values you embraced.
But why is it that businesses that are “too big to fail” don’t seem bound
by the same moral economy as the rest of us? It turns out that
anthropologists may have some insight, not only on this question, but
also how we might integrate our economic and moral values that so often
appear at odds. Researchers have found that the interconnection between
economics and morality is seen most clearly in small communities where
everybody knows each other, everyone has a free choice in who they deal
with, and gossip can make or break reputations. This is even the case
for societies that look very different from our own.
For example, in 2006 the anthropologist Joseph Henrich and colleagues published a study in the journal Science (pdf here)
based on their analysis of 15 different societies ranging from American
college students to urban wage workers in Ghana to semi-nomadic
foragers in the Bolivian rainforest. By having each group conduct a
series of economic games, the researchers found that there was a
positive correlation between how much people punished cheaters and the
amount of altruistic behavior in the society as a whole. What’s more,
every society engaged in some form of costly punishment even though
there was a great deal of variability between societies.
The researchers’ conclusion was that altruistic punishment emerged in
our species through a process of gene-culture coevolution. In other
words, human psychology is biologically predisposed to enforce a system
of fairness, but how much we do so depends on the culture we see
reflected around us. This result was later supported by another study in 2010 that developed a model explaining how even “selfish genes” could promote altruistic traits.
