Content area
Full Text
Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 451 pp.
In the last two decades, economic experiments have shown that people's choices often deviate substantially from those that would maximize their immediate material payoffs. Although experimental results were quite consistent across different countries, most subjects were college students and all were members of industrialized societies. Recently, Joseph Henrich and colleagues extended these methods to small-scale societies, attempting to measure the effects of cultural variation, ecological adaptation, and social interaction on decisions in some standard economic games. The present volume, edited by two anthropologists and four rather heterodox economists, details their findings. These are often surprising and always stimulating, and they contain broad (but contested) implications for a variety of social sciences.
The basic research program summarized in this book consisted of running economic experiments in 15 foraging, horticultural, and pastoral societies scattered around the globe, from Amazonia to Mongolia. The experiments were directed by ethnographers conducting broader longterm projects in these communities. The book consists of reports by each ethnographer-experimenter, plus theoretical and methodological summaries by the editors. The chapter authors have diverse theoretical orientations, including behavioral ecology, economic anthropology, cultural evolutionism, cognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and economics. But all are committed to quantitative analysis of rigorously collected ethnographic data.
To the extent practicable, the ethnographers followed a common protocol in...