Human beings are complicated. Sometimes they’re generous. Sometimes they’re selfish. Sometimes they’re both.
Washington State University evolutionary anthropologist Kristopher Smith is interested in how communities work together, especially when they’re faced with change. How well do they cooperate?
He has just published a study based on his work with a tribe of hunters in Tanzania.
This study lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kristopher Smith: Oftentimes, people look to hunter gatherers to get a view of human nature and we know that hunter gatherers today share broadly any food they bring back to camp. They're often described as egalitarian. But what we really want to know is what is the process that produces that egalitarianism? Is it that people are willing to give to one another freely? Or are they reaching equality by actually taking from those that have more?
So we designed this experiment to test that hypothesis to test those two views of human nature. This is out in East Africa, out in dry woodland savanna area.
The Hadza have been a fascinating population for anthropologists for a century, one of the last remaining hunter gatherer populations. They're getting most of their calories still today from foraged goods, whether that's hunting antelope, gazelle, dik-dik, or foraging for plant goods and honey.
DN: To find the information he was looking for, Smith had members of the tribe play a game.
KS: An economic game. These games are really useful for understanding people's preferences, under conditions of anonymity, right? So we're always concerned about reputation, and being paid back in the future. So games try to clean this up a bit.
What we do is we take people into private and we have Polaroid photos that we've taken of everyone in the camp. So we put their photo in front of them. And then we put a photo of another camp mate face down. So they know it's someone in their camp that they'll be playing with, but they don't know who. We then either put eight tokens on their photo or four on their camp mates or vice versa, so they either have more than the other person or less. And then we let them either give or take tokens to or from the other person. And later, these tokens will be exchanged for dry banana chips, which they really enjoy.
We let them just move the tokens around understanding that, if they are taking tokens from the other person, they're taking banana chips. And if they're giving tokens, they're giving banana chips. This really allowed them the option to give and take. So where previous games that have been played with Hadza and many other hunter gatherers across the world, they usually only give the option to give. So they're given a set of tokens or set of money, and then they can give it to the other person. Here, we set up that opportunity to take from others. So to really test that idea about, are people reaching equality because they're giving or is it because they're taking from others when they have less?
DN: So you played the game with these hunters. What did you find?
KS: One, we found a lot of variations.
There are some people who, even when they already have less than the other person, were willing to give more. But on the other hand, we also found people who were selfish. In fact, most people ended up taking all of what was on the other person's photo. So a lot of people were willing to take from others. And indeed, we found that equality was much more likely to be reached when the other person started out with more because they were willing to take tokens from them. Though again, I do want to emphasize, we do find variation where we do find very generous folks.
DN: What meaning do you derive from what you saw?
KS: That's a great question. You know, this is always a concern for anthropologists and how do we make sure that we're generalizing in a scientifically appropriate way.
I think, here, what has always struck folks who have been doing these games with hunter-gatherer societies is that when you first reach the societies, they're well known for being generous and egalitarian. They share food. But what has repeatedly been found is that, in fact, in these games, they're often much more selfish than, say, U.S. undergrads, where they're only willing to give about 10% of what they have, whereas undergrads will give like 40 to 50%.
We're all humans, right? We're looking for these universal general processes. But I think what this shows is sort of the importance of the different kinds of institutions that we find ourselves in, right?
So they have more tolerance for demanding sort of that equality from one another. And indeed, one thing we find that sort of points to some universal processes is that those people who had more experience with markets and other people living outside of Hadza land were actually less willing to take, suggesting that maybe they're respecting property rights as they become more involved in markets. And ironically, it's leading to more inequality because they're not willing to take when they have less.
This was in collaboration with one of my co-authors, Duncan Stabert-Hawks, who is really interested in inequality. He's been working with other folks who work in Amazonia, looking at some of these processes of inequality and egalitarianism and how are they able to reach equality and how are they not? He has some exciting things, I know, in the pipeline that he's looking forward to getting out.
Unfortunately, I haven't had an opportunity to get back out to work with Hadza since pre-COVID. But it's definitely something I hope to follow up on, thinking how exposure to other cultures might be changing their other social behaviors and social psychology.
DN: Kristopher Smith's paper was published this month in the journal PNAS Nexus.
