The Ash Twins Blog

From Burnham and Kurzban’s open critique of Henrich et al (2005):

Tinbergen provided a framework that explained both maximizing behavior and persistent failures to maximize in particular settings (Tinbergen 1968), and this framework has become the standard for the study of the behavior of all animals except humans.

As an example of Tinbergen’s approach, consider work showing that herring gulls fail to maximize in environments constructed to include artificial eggs. Careful experimental studies were able to pick apart the mechanisms that gulls use for egg selection (Baerends & Drent 1982a; 1982b). These mechanisms (1) arose by natural selection, (2) advanced the inclusive fitness of the individuals in natural environments, and, crucially, (3) failed spectacularly in particular, artificial settings.

Tinbergen’s theory and its applications suggest a similar explanation for human economic behavior that fails to maximize, and this approach is already providing novel insights. For example, it has long been known that humans fail to maximize in many experimental settings involving time discounting (Ainslie 1974; Rachlin 1970). A recent study manipulated the mechanism of discounting and caused an increase or decrease in the deviation from maximization (Wilson & Daly 2004). By illuminating one aspect of the cognitive architecture behind discounting, this work suggests that the apparently puzzling economic behavior is simply caused by adaptive mechanisms interacting with particular and peculiar environments.

Similarly, a growing body of research investigates the mechanisms that modulate prosocial behavior as a function of anonymity. Models based on signaling (Smith & Bliege Bird 2000) or reputation (Panchanathan & Boyd 2003; Trivers 1971) predict the adaptive value of psychological mechanisms sensitive to cues of anonymity. Indeed, people modulate their behavior as a function of anonymity (Burnham 2003; Hoffman et al. 1996b; Rege & Telle 2004) and prosociality is more likely when actions are observed.

In fact, the data in the target article would not be surprising at all if they took place in a repeated, non-anonymous setting with an ability to generate reputations. Is this failure to maximize – like that of gulls with artificial eggs and people discounting in the laboratory – caused by mechanisms interacting with specific environmental cues? If so, it might be possible to create prosociality using cues to social presence. In particular, a powerful cue is likely to be the presence or absence of eyes, which is used to modulate behavior across many species (Call et al. 2003; Hampton 1994; Hare et al. 2001).

This hypothesis that eyes will produce prosocial economic behavior has been tested and confirmed in two studies. Contributions to a public good game increased by 29% in the presence of human eyes (Burnham & Hare, in press; see also Kurzban 2001). Similarly, contributions in a dictator game were increased 32% by the presentation of eyespots (Haley & Fessler 2005). We are optimistic that the continued application of Tinbergen’s framework to human economic decisions may provide both proximate and ultimate explanations for prosocial behavior.

The Economist has a great piece on the troubles facing Rwanda 15 years after

collective insanity. . . gripped a whole country in April 1994, when the Hutu killers turned on their Tutsi fellow citizens and Hutu sympathisers, leaving over 800,000 dead in three months.

Take the memorial at the National University of Rwanda in Butare. . . [M]ost of the staff and students at the university, over 500 in all, were slaughtered in just two weeks or so. . . Many of the students were killed by their own teachers, specifically the dean of agriculture and vice-dean of political science. The former not only personally killed students but organised the campus massacre as well. What could have been running through their minds in the weeks leading up to the killings, as these highly educated people calculated how best they could hack or shoot their own students to death? . . .

[O]ne of Rwanda’s main problems, in terms of justice and retribution, has been that so many Hutus, hundreds of thousands of them, became génocidaires; it was always going to be impossible to impose the harshest sentences on all of them. Only the ringleaders have been tried by an international court sitting in neighbouring Tanzania. Thousands of others in Rwanda have been sentenced to prison by local traditional courts known as gacaga. Gangs of them can be seen in their distinctive overalls, doing hard labour, digging irrigation ditches and so on, all over Rwanda. . .

[I]t is only now that thousands of former génocidaires who have been fighting for many years from bases in the jungles of eastern Congo against the current Tutsi-dominated government are at last returning to Rwanda. . . They are being re-educated in special camps in the hope that they can be peacefully reintegrated into Rwandan society.

I would draw special attention to the following excerpt in light of yesterday’s post about racial categorization’s causal link to racism:

To encourage reconciliation, Rwanda has embarked on an experiment to change completely the way a new generation thinks about itself. Now, officially, no one is a Hutu or Tutsi; there are only Rwandans. Ethnicity, the genocide’s alleged cause, is being outlawed.

While this law arguably amounts to a criminalization of speech and assembly,  Kurzban’s theory of racism suggests that it will have healthy effects on racial relations in Rwanda.

Other laws emerging from the Rwandan government are not as encouraging:

Critics fear that any challenge to an already authoritarian government is gradually being outlawed under a pretext of criminalising the promotion of so-called “genocide ideology”. There were already stiff penalties for “divisionism”, an acknowledgment of differences between Hutu and Tutsi. But last year a new and even fiercer law was passed. . .

Clause three, for instance, states that the crime of promoting genocide ideology is characterised by “dehumanising a person or group with the same characteristics”, and that this can be done by “marginalising, laughing at one’s misfortune, defaming, mocking, boasting, despising, degrading, creating confusion aimed at negating the genocide which occurred, stirring up ill feelings”. . .

Human-rights critics say these ill-defined laws are being abused by the government, enabling it to prosecute anyone, including young children, who say anything the government dislikes or who draw attention to the role of [Rwanda President] Kagame’s own RPF in the massacres of 1994. . .

The economic recovery after the genocide, when Hutu militias looted the country before fleeing into Congo, had been remarkable, if largely funded by the diaspora and by foreign aid. But in the past few years it has stalled. The number of Rwandans living in extreme poverty is reckoned to have declined from over 75% in 1994 to 57% in 2006. But the figure has barely moved since then.

You can read the whole article here: http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13447279