I like this because in the end, chicks win. One of the hidden messages of Steven Goldberg's book (Why Men Rule) is that women can accomplish as many goals effectively using feminine means as men do using masculine means, just that women's goals differ from men's. This experiment seems to prove that.

But Razib, be fair: "Remember the whole schtick about how human universals are what matter, and they're hard-wired by the Stone Age EEA?"--Yeah, and it wasn't based on studies. It was based on anthropological observation that certain facial expressions are universal: shock, anger, horror, joy at at baby's first tooth...

The creation of mass media fed this notion. The UN ditty, "It's a Small World" was contemporary with the late-50s/early-60s flowering of Life magazine, whose purpose (founded by liberal Repub Henry Luce, son of missionaries in China) was to prove that We Are All One. Ditto goes for National Geographic, which got criticized for showing too much brown nipple. Their entire purpose was to prove that no matter how different Tibetan yak herders and New Guinean headhunters were from us, It's a Small World After All. You are too young to remember that Kennedy stuff. It was pretty potent and no one who drunk of it at an early age is free of it.

Maybe that's why I still do believe in certain human universals and I don't know if this experiment disproves their existence.

The studies Razib is talking about are relevant to the specific claims of universality of much of economics and the ahistorical types of psychology. It's very odd, because the "rational mind" was very slowly and painfully developed over thousands of years, ultimately bringing into existence the free market economy and modern science, and now scientific economists and scientific psychologists are projecting this painfully-contructed artifact back into history as the Universal Human Rational Mind. To a degree, in a rather insane projection they have made their own highly-developed and carefully-trained minds as scientific models of everyone else's mind any time anywhere.

I don't know if I've mentioned it before and Razib may have read it, but Morton Fried's "Evolution of Political Society" is a good quick discussion of that topic. I think of it as a major work though it seems to get less play than it should. Fried takes an evolutionary point of view with a little flavor of technological and environmental determinism (but not too much). He is not a cultural pluralist in the sense of talking about the multitude of unique cultures -- he generalizes.

Perry Anderson's "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" and "Lineages of the Absolutist State" carries political history up to the present.

What seems to come out of a lot of these studies is a general contrast between high-risk and low-risk strategies, as you've said. It seems that a lot of areas can be examined in these terms: male vs. female strategies, military vs. civil, elite vs. commoner, entrepreneur vs. cautious, heretic vs. orthodox, migrant vs. rooted, free riders vs. good citizens.

These aren't symmetrical pairs. The left side (above) will have more big winners and also more big losers. The future belongs to some of those on the left side, but not to most of them. Often the leftmost entrepreneurs hardly profit at all, and see the benefits scooped in by the centrists (the stablest of the entrepreneurs, or the most adventurous of the cautious).

"Costly signalling" works in here somewhere. Entrepreneurs and experimenters take the riskier path and can be presumed to have some surplus strength -- especially compared to those who are just barely surviving even with a cautious strategy.

I think that this is also a case when individual rationality and social rationality diverge. I think that caution is usually individually more rational, and that entrepreneurship is often even socially harmful, but in the exceptional case of entrepreneurship is sometimes socially profitable enough to justify all the losses.

In historical or evolutionary societies, the rare new exception (mutation) sometimes (but not usually) trumps the far more common normals.

"t's very odd, because the "rational mind" was very slowly and painfully developed over thousands of years, ultimately bringing into existence the free market economy and modern science"

Gosh, John, you sound almost like....Harpending & Cochran. Writ large. This is not a diss. It may be a dig, though.

It was based on anthropological observation that certain facial expressions are universal: shock, anger, horror, joy at at baby's first tooth...

oh, i'm not denying universals. just that tooby et. al. tend to shoehorn everything into it. joe heinrich notes that the universality of modal behavior of college students in experimental economics was a talking point some evo psych people would bring up. but when these studies on small scale societies in the late 90s arrived there was silence. not that all evo psych people would be surprised, geoff miller & david buss for example don't buy into strong universality anymore.*

* strong universality of behavior btw is 'buttressed' by a really bizarre argument about the importance of mechanistic epistasis and the contingency of complex traits

Boyd and Gintis are the best overlap between my interests and Razib's.

Economic rationality is a total can of worms. Sometimes its a formal simplifying assumption, sometimes it seems to be secretly normative, sometimes it's claimed to be descriptive of typical or modal human behavior, and it has any number of definitions (five categories of definitions according to one libertarian, and he doesn't mention Sen's new definition).

Well, the point of the (one-shot) "ultimatum" game is that a "rational" player ought to accept any offer, since once the offer is made it's a choice between getting something or getting nothing, the a player presumably being indifferent to the rewards of the other player.

If the experimenter is something other than an astonishing dolt he'll realize the assumption was wrong, of course, but how likely is that? Who but an astonishing dolt would have made such an asumption in the first place?

When the radical and highly dubious step of asking the participants about their thought processes is taken, one finds (if one fails to make the standard assumption that the participants are lying) that not only are the participants not indifferent to the rewards of the other players, they aren't even indifferent to the rewards of the experimenter. Which, interestingly, can have the effect of turning a non-zero sum game back into a zero sum one.

I tend to be unimpressed with this type of experiment.

female offspring are a sure bet, but male offspring are a bigger bet.


So, the interesting question here, then is, why don't females always have female offspring?

Ohhh.

Then, are females facultatively able to choose to skew the sex of their offspring, or do we see several different stable strategies. Ie, those females who more frequently have male offspring, those who more frequently have female offspring, and those who mix it up a bit. And, if that is the case, is there a premium on recognizing males that are appropriate for your reproductive strategy?

Then, are females facultatively able to choose to skew the sex of their offspring, or do we see several different stable strategies.

the TWH has been empirically confirmed in some animals, including, possibly, in humans (e.g., high status groups within societies seem to bias toward males and low status toward females, etc.). google it.

If the experimenter is something other than an astonishing dolt he'll realize the assumption was wrong, of course, but how likely is that? Who but an astonishing dolt would have made such an asumption in the first place?

george, the work that i'm talking about is in part measuring the extent of deviation from 'rationality' (e.g., accepting any offer of any size) across populations. it does vary, with some being closer to 'rationality' than others....

Then, are females facultatively able to choose to skew the sex of their offspring, or do we see several different stable strategies.

the TWH has been empirically confirmed in some animals, including, possibly, in humans (e.g., high status groups within societies seem to bias toward males and low status toward females, etc.). google it.

Oh, yes, I agree that the TWH has been confirmed at least in some non-human animals.

What I wonder, with humans, is are the tests sensitive enough to distinguish between the actors directly skewing their offspring ratio towards what would improve their reproductive success, or the actors practicing a subtle form of assortative mating?

Razib, george weinberg--

george, the work that i'm talking about is in part measuring the extent of deviation from 'rationality' (e.g., accepting any offer of any size) across populations. it does vary, with some being closer to 'rationality' than others....

To me the biggest problem with experiments of this type is their extreme artificiality.

How often are we SURE than any test of whether we will punish a lack of reasonable reciprocation in an exchange sort of transaction, is really a “one off” – completely? After all, there’s not just our reputation with the particular individual that we punish (to our harm as well), or let get away with paltry reciprocation. There’s our reputation among “his people”, “my own people” and perhaps groups both interact with.

It makes lots of sense that many of us have STRONG instincts to retaliate even at some immediate cost to ourselves – and that it takes a very artificial, rather “bookish” and “bookish puzzle solving” sort of mindset to “rationally” override those impulses which are ingrained for good reason.

I’d also expect that while abstaining from retaliation to maximize narrow game rule results is positively correlated with IQ, it would be negatively correlated with testosterone including within males and with “leadership” or “alpha” social traits. I.e. those who care most about their social leadership type reps.

Any data on any of that that anyone knows of?

What I wonder, with humans, is are the tests sensitive enough to distinguish between the actors directly skewing their offspring ratio towards what would improve their reproductive success,

see sarah blaffer hrdy in mother nature.

You mean not everybody in the world acts like UC Santa Barbara students?

I’d also expect that while abstaining from retaliation to maximize narrow game rule results is positively correlated with IQ.

Boyd and Gintis describe innate "strong reciprocity" which includes both simple reciprocity (tit for tat) and also altruistic retaliation against defectors and free riders.

Besides artificiality, these games tend to be small-stakes. It would be interesting to see what people would do if the total payoff were, say, $2000 for a quick game. I think that practically anybody would reject a $1 share, even though they never expect to see the other player again, just on "general principles" (= strong reciprocity). I'd probably reject anything less than $100. At some point past $100, the reward would become big enough that I would stop thinking of fairness.

In Boyd and Gintis, "strong reciprocity" is what make group loyalty possible, in turn making the enforcement of non-innate cultural group principles possibles, leading to stable culturalized societies which compete with one another. The ones which succeed in the environment offer a net reproductive advantage to their members on the average or collectively, even though some of the altruistic members lose reproductively.

This makes a kind of group selection for altruism possible, while it is not possible in natural non-acculturated groups behaving only according to innate predispositions. It also raises th possibility that an altruist (e.g. one adopted by an unrelated group) is acting on the behalf of his culture ("memes") rather than on the behalf of his genes.

We now have three definitions of individual rationality on the table: maximizing your descendents, maximizing your culture's descendents, and (the non-altruistic freerider option) maximizing your own personal pleasure, welfare, or utility (regardless of your descendents or your cultural fellows).

Individual rationality can also be defined to include a "taste for altruism", so that someone might take pleasure in seeing another's pleasure and sacrifice other pleasure for that one. Or it might include a "taste for descendants" -- taking pleasure in children and grandchildren and sacrificing other pleasure for them. ("Taste" is sometimes used in economics as a technical term describing the "given preferences" or "given desires" of individuals).

Questions about rationality and altruism are intellectually difficult and complex, but people tend to go through life with folkish convictions not based on science. Functionally I tend to believe that this is a good thing. A lot of the scientific approaches to these questions (espeically in economics) tend to privilege free-riding / selfish / law of the jungle individual rationality, which is the form which is easiest to state formally (especially when working with an individualist ontology). If all humans were individualist hedonist rationalists (autists or sociopaths) with no taste for the happiness of others or for children, I suspect that it would not be long before there were no humans. ("Man is a political animal").

Besides artificiality, these games tend to be small-stakes.

the stakes aren't small in the 'small scale societies.' e.g., people are rejecting a week's worth of wages, etc. that is what makes them interesting.

the work that i'm talking about is in part measuring the extent of deviation from 'rationality' (e.g., accepting any offer of any size) across populations. it does vary, with some being closer to 'rationality' than others....

But once you've rejected the idea of "rationality", I'm not convinced the number means anything. Different people will have different reasons for accepting or rejecting offers, and the where someone switches from "accept" to "reject" doesn't provide much insight as to what the dominant reason for an individual might be.

I'm OK with "rationality" so long as I get to define it.

"Rational" in the context of game theory has a very specific well-defined meaning. A "rational" player is a perfect logician that acts in such a way as to maximize his expected score.

Of course, real people don't even play games this way, let alone live life.

In Prospect Theory or Skill Signalling (Working Paper)Rick Harbaugh says:

Failure is embarrassing. In gambles involving both skill and chance, we show that a strategic desire to avoid appearing unskilled generates behavioral anomalies that are typically explained by prospect theory's concepts of loss aversion, probability weighting, and framing effects. Loss aversion arises because losing any gamble, even a friendly bet with little or no money at stake, reflects poorly on the decision maker's skill. Probability weighting emerges because winning a gamble with a low probability of success is a strong signal of skill, while losing a gamble with a high probability of success is a strong signal of incompetence. Framing matters when there are multiple equilibria and the framing of a gamble affects beliefs, e.g., when someone takes a "dare" rather than admit a lack of skill. The analysis is based on models from the career concerns literature and is closely related to early social psychology models of risk taking. The results provide an alternative approach to the widespread application of prospect theory to managerial and financial decisions where both skill and chance are important. We show that in specific situations skill signaling makes opposite predictions than prospect theory, allowing for tests between the strategic and behavioral approaches to understanding risk. (New highly revised version. Formerly titled "Skill signaling, prospect theory, and regret theory".)

One wonders if there is a subtle sex-based biasing going on here as well?

Over on Marginal Revolution, the question seems to be Why are women more religious?