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Why we tend to be nice with strangers | People from large industrialized societies tend to be nice with strangers. Now, researchers have found why we are surprisingly fair and trusting with unfamiliar individuals. This pro-social behaviour results from a change in social norms that allowed us to trust strangers, according to the new study. The change is likely linked to a rise in markets where goods are exchanged for money, as well as increased participation in major world religions. The finding challenges a previously suggested theory- the idea that we treat strangers fairly because we mistakenly transferred our feelings of kinship to unrelated individuals as societies grew. The results, based on more than 2,000 participants
from 15 societies across the globe, show that "fair" behaviour during a bargaining
game increases the more a society has incorporated market exchange and world religions.
"Measures of fairness toward anonymous others, in terms of motivations and beliefs,
vary dramatically across human societies. And we can explain most of the variation
between groups by the degree of market incorporation and the presence of a world
religion," Live Science quoted study author Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist
at the University of British Columbia, Canada, as saying. According to researchers,
in order for market exchange to really take off, societies had to evolve new norms
for interacting with strangers. Similarly, major world religions, with their beliefs
about fairness and punishment, could have also influenced changes norms and allowed
societies to grow. Religions in small-scale societies tend to lack such moralizing
gods that are concerned with generosity toward strangers, said Henrich. "One of
the things that might have occurred through cultural evolution to help build these
larger groups, is the evolution of religious systems with supernatural agents
that were in some sense police, concerned about those elements of behavior that
would facilitate exchange and trade and harmonious groups, allowing groups to
get larger and larger," he said. To test out these ideas, the researchers studied
participants from small-scale communities in Africa, North and South America,
Oceania, New Guinea, and Asia. The subjects played three bargaining games. Very
small communities with almost no market integration and less involvement in world
religions generally made lower, or less fair, offers during the games, and were
less willing to punish unfair offers. On the flip side, the largest societies
with the most market integration and world religion participation made higher
offers, and were more willing to penalize those who made unfair offers. "This
is consistent with the idea that the expansion of human societies was driven by
the evolution of these norms that allowed people to interact with strangers,"
said Henrich. The results will be published in the journal Science.
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