Joseph Henrich: belief

Transcript context

…What proportion of the variation in cooperation, let’s say in a prisoner’s dilemma, would you say is phenotypic versus cultural? I ask because you seemed very much on the side of culture earlier in the talk. But then your comment about the adoption of missionary religion seems to suggest that culture is much more mutable than something like the persistence of cooperation over many generations could explain or could be explained by. Thinking about phenotype, we have evidence from twin studies in Sweden and the US suggesting that about half of the variation, say behavioral economic games, is explained by genes. There’s no reason to think that that actually extends to other populations. For example, the kind of variation you would get in something like the ultimatum game, which is a standard behavioral economics game, you don’t even get that kind of variation in the smallest-scale human societies. People just — they always accept offers in the ultimatum game. It’s pretty hard to make an estimate of the different contributions from genes and culture. I think for explaining most of these things, you want to recognize that we have an evolved psychology that allows us to acquire social norms. What you’re really trying to figure out is what social norms people are mapping onto the experiments or to the situation, and how those social norms vary across societies. I would start by trying to explain the variation in social norms across societies. Let’s give a big round of applause for Joe.…

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