Authors: Paul Bloom
26
Plainly, a self-interested agent would give nothing. But this is not what people do:
C. Engel, “Dictator Games: A Meta Study,”
Experimental Economics
14 (2011): 583–610.
27
We are often generous, but not in this sort of indiscriminate way:
S. D. Levitt and J. A. List, “What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
21 (2007): 153–74.
28
the more observable one’s choice is, the more one gives:
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,
Superfreakonomics
(New York: William Morrow, 2009); E. Hoffman, K. McCabe, K. Shachat, and V. Smith, “Preferences, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games,”
Games and Economic Behavior
7 (1994): 346–80; A. Franzen and S. Pointner, “Anonymity in the Dictator Game Revisited,”
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
81 (2012): 74–81.
29
Even pictures of eyes on the wall or on the computer screen make people kinder:
K. Haley and D. Fessler, “Nobody’s Watching? Subtle Cues Affect Generosity in an Anonymous Economic Game,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
26 (2005): 245–56; M. Bateson, D. Nettle, and G. Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,”
Biology Letters
12 (2006): 412–14.
30
Tom Lehrer, in his song about the Boy Scouts:
Quoted in Martin A. Nowak and Roger Highfield,
SuperCooperators: Altruism Evolution and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
(New York: Free Press, 2011).
31
the psychologist Jason Dana and his colleagues tweaked the standard Dictator Game:
J. Dana, M. C. Daylian, and R. M. Dawes, “What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Me: Costly (but Quiet) Exit in Dictator Games,”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
100 (2006): 193–201.
32
The second set of experiments was done by the economist John List:
J. List, “On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games,”
Journal of Political Economy
115 (2007): 482–94.
33
The economist Ernst Fehr and his colleagues:
E. Fehr, H. Bernhard, and B. Rockenbach, “Egalitarianism in Young Children,”
Nature
454 (2008): 1079–83.
34
more recent research on the Dictator Game in different countries:
P. Rochat, M. D. G. Dias, G. Liping, T. Broesch, C. Passos-Ferreira, A. Winning, and B. Berg, “Fairness in Distributive Justice
in 3- and 5-Year-Olds Across Seven Cultures,”
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
40 (2009): 416–42.
35
The psychologist Vanessa LoBue and her colleagues:
V. LoBue, T. Nishida, C. Chiong, J. S. DeLoache, and J. Haidt, “When Getting Something Good Is Bad: Even Three-Year-Olds React to Inequality,”
Social Development
20 (2011): 154–70.
36
In this regard, they are similar to monkeys, chimpanzees, and dogs:
S. F. Brosnan and F. B. M. de Waal, “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,”
Nature
425 (2003): 297–99; S. F. Brosnan, H. C. Schiff, and F. B. M. de Waal, “Tolerance for Inequity May Increase with Social Closeness in Chimpanzees,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
1560 (2005): 253–58; F. Range, L. Horn, Z. Viranyi, and L. Huber, “The Absence of Reward Induces Inequity Aversion in Dogs,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
106 (2008): 340–45.
37
Children can also be spiteful in their preferences:
P. R. Blake and K. McAuliffe, “ ‘I Had So Much It Didn’t Seem Fair’: Eight-Year-Olds Reject Two Forms of Inequity,”
Cognition
120 (2011): 215–24.
38
Further evidence of children’s spiteful natures:
M. Sheskin, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Anti-equality: Social Comparison in Young Children,” under review.
39
a medieval Jewish folktale about an envious man:
Thanks to Shira Telushkin.
40
“We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels”:
Quoted in A. J. Jacobs,
The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
41
some scholars … view moral outrage as more important to morality than empathy:
Jesse Prinz, “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?,” in
Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives
, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
42
Let us start with revenge:
For a review, see M. E. McCullough, R. Kurzban, and B. A. Tabak, “Cognitive Systems for Revenge and Forgiveness,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
36 (2013): 1–15.
43
Adam Smith describes our feelings toward a man who has murdered someone we love:
Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759; repr., Lawrence, KS:
Digireads.com
, 2011), 50.
44
“Prepare to die!”:
These famous lines are from the book by William Goldman, but the scene where he explains this to the man in black is only in the movie (1987, directed by Rob Reiner). See William Goldman,
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure
(New York: Harcourt, 2007).
45
“A past wrong against you … that such treatment is acceptable”:
P. Hieronymi, “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
62 (2001): 546, quoted in A. Martin, “Owning Up and Lowering Down: The Power of Apology,”
Journal of Philosophy
107 (2010): 534–53.
46
cultures of honor:
Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen,
Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South
(Denver, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
47
Steven Pinker argues:
Pinker,
Better Angels.
48
The theme of payback shows up over and over in fiction:
John Kerrigan,
Revenge Tragedy: From Aeschylus to Armageddon
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); William Flesch,
Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
49
“human flesh search engines”:
T. Downey, “China’s Cyberposse,”
New York Times Magazine
, March 7, 2010.
50
the Public Goods Game:
G. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”
Science
162 (1968): 1243–48; D. G. Rand, A. Dreber, T. Ellingsen, D. Fudenberg, and M. A. Nowak, “Positive Interactions Promote Public Cooperation,”
Science
325 (2009): 1272–75.
51
inevitably some participants succumb to temptation:
E. Fehr and S. Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,”
Nature
415 (2002): 137–40.
52
Ernst Fehr and the economist Simon Gächter explored this idea:
Fehr and Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans.”
53
it’s vexingly hard to explain how such behavior could evolve through natural selection:
See, for example, A. Dreber, D. G. Rand, D. Fudenberg, and M. A. Nowak, “Winners Don’t Punish,”
Nature
452 (2008): 348–51.
54
Perhaps altruistic punishment could have evolved through some sort of group selection:
R. Boyd, H. Gintis, S. Bowles, and P. J. Richerson, “The Evolution of Altruistic Punishment,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
100 (2003): 3531–35.
55
perhaps punishers thrive because other individuals like them and prefer to interact with them:
H. Gintis, E. A. Smith, and S. Bowles, “Costly Signaling and Cooperation,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology
213 (2001): 103–19.
56
altruistic punishment is rare—or even nonexistent—in the small-scale societies of the real world:
F. Guala, “Reciprocity: Weak or Strong? What Punishment Experiments Do (and Do Not) Demonstrate,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
35 (2012): 1–59.
57
“antisocial punishment”:
B. Herrmann, C. Thoni, and S. Gächter, “Antisocial Punishment Across Societies,”
Science
319 (2008): 1362–67.
58
Adam Smith’s view:
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 52.
59
Consistent with the idea … the person harming the victim:
Thanks to Jonathan Phillips for discussing this with me.
60
Even young children have some appreciation of the logic of third-party punishment:
D. Pietraszewski and T. German, “Coalitional Psychology on the Playground: Reasoning About Indirect Social Consequences in Preschoolers and Adults,”
Cognition
126 (2013): 352–63.
61
some of the odder features of our punitive sentiments:
J. M. Darley, K. M. Carlsmith, and P. H. Robinson, “Incapacitation and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment,”
Law and Human Behavior
24 (2000): 659–83; C. R. Sunstein, “Moral Heuristics,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
28 (2005): 531–43; J. Baron and I. Ritov, “Intuitions About Penalties and Compensation in the Context of Tort Law,”
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty
7 (1993): 17–33.
62
“He must be made to repent …”:
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 50.
63
“All men, even the most stupid and unthinking …”:
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 66.
64
Young children are highly aggressive … it peaks at about age two:
S. Côté, T. Vaillancourt, J. C. LeBlanc, D. S. Nagin, and R. E. Tremblay, “The Development of Physical Aggression from Toddlerhood to Pre-adolescence: A Nationwide Longitudinal Study of Canadian Children,”
Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
34 (2006): 71–85.
65
Children tattle … the children would spontaneously complain to adults:
H. Rakoczy, F. Warneken, and M. Tomasello, “The Sources of Normativity: Young Children’s Awareness of the Normative Structure of Games,”
Developmental Psychology
44 (2008): 875–81.
66
In studies of siblings … they were not making things up:
I. M. Den Bak and H. S. Ross, “ ‘I’m Telling!’ The Content, Context, and Consequences of Children’s Tattling on Their Siblings,”
Social Development
5 (1996): 292–309; H. S. Ross and I. M. Den Bak-Lammers, “Consistency and Change in Children’s Tattling on Their Siblings: Children’s Perspectives on the Moral Rules and Procedures of Family Life,”
Social Development
7 (1998): 275–300.
67
Gordon Ingram and Jesse Bering explored tattling by children in an inner-city school:
G. P. D. Ingram and J. M. Bering, “Children’s Tattling: The Reporting of Everyday Norm Violations in Preschool Settings,”
Child Development
81 (2010): 945–57.
68
Children also don’t tattle about insignificant things:
A. Vaish, M. Missana, and M. Tomasello, “Three-Year-Old Children Intervene in Third-Party Moral Transgressions,”
British Journal of Developmental Psychology
29 (2011): 124–30.
69
a variant of the good guy/bad guy experiments:
J. K. Hamlin, K. Wynn, P. Bloom, and N. Mahajan, “How Infants and Toddlers React to Antisocial Others,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108 (2011): 19931–36.
70
an influential theory of moral development:
L. Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization,” in
Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research
, ed. David A. Goslin (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), 347–480; Jean Piaget,
The Moral Judgement of the Child
, trans. Marjorie Gabain (New York: Free Press, 1965). For review and discussion, see John C. Gibbs,
Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman
(New York: Sage, 2003).
71
“hodgepodge morality”:
D. A. Pizarro, “Hodgepodge Morality,” in
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
ed. John Brockman (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 63.