Moral Sentiments and

Material Interests

Economic Learning and Social Evolution

General Editor

Ken Binmore, Director of the Economic Learning and Social Evolution Centre, University College London

1.Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection, Larry Samuelson, 1997

2.The Theory of Learning in Games, Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine, 1998

3.Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 2: Just Playing, Ken Binmore, 1998

4.Social Dynamics, Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young, editors, 2001

5.Evolutionary Dynamics and Extensive Form Games, Ross Cressman, 2003

6.Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life, Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, editors, 2005

Moral Sentiments and

Material Interests

The Foundations of

Cooperation in Economic

Life

edited by

Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

( 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moral sentiments and material interests : the foundations of cooperation in economic life

/edited by Herbert Gintis . . . [et al.].

p. cm. — (Economic learning and social evolution ; 6) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-262-07252-1 (alk. paper)

1. Cooperation. 2. Game theory. 3. Economics—Sociological aspects. I. Gintis, Herbert. II. MIT Press series on economic learning and social evolution ; v. 6.

HD2961.M657 2004

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Adele Simmons who, as President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, had the vision and courage to support unconventional transdisciplinary research in the behavioral sciences.

Contents

Series Foreword ix

Preface xi

I Introduction 1

1Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: Origins, Evidence, and Consequences 3

Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr

3The Natural History of Human Food Sharing and Cooperation:

A Review and a New Multi-Individual Approach to the Negotiation of Norms 75

Hillard Kaplan and Michael Gurven

viii Contents

13Social Capital, Moral Sentiments, and Community Governance

379

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

Contributors 399 Index 401

Series Foreword

The MIT Press series on Economic Learning and Social Evolution reflects the continuing interest in the dynamics of human interaction. This issue has provided a broad community of economists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, mathematicians, philosophers, and others with such a strong sense of common purpose that traditional interdisciplinary boundaries have melted away. We reject the outmoded notion that what happens away from equilibrium can safely be ignored, but think it no longer adequate to speak in vague terms of bounded rationality and spontaneous order. We believe the time has come to put some beef on the table.

The books in the series so far are:

0 Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection, by Larry Samuelson (1997). Traditional economic models have only one equilibrium and therefore fail to come to grips with social norms whose function is to select an equilibrium when there are multiple alternatives. This book studies how such norms may evolve.

0 The Theory of Learning in Games, by Drew Fudenberg and David Levine (1998). John Von Neumann introduced ‘‘fictitious play’’ as a way of finding equilibria in zero-sum games. In this book, the idea is reinterpreted as a learning procedure and developed for use in general games.

0 Just Playing, by Ken Binmore (1998). This book applies evolutionary game theory to moral philosophy. How and why do we make fairness judgments?

0 Social Dynamics, edited by Steve Durlauf and Peyton Young (2001). The essays in this collection provide an overview of the field of social dynamics, in which some of the creators of the field discuss a variety