With the end of the last glacial age, human population exploded. Large settlements, >300 persons, became typical. Scientists of early humans hypothesize that mechanisms for social integration based on the "kinship and reciprocity" structures of small-scale social life would be ineffective in large-scale societies. New social systems and cultural norms needed to evolve to facilitate social interaction. Central to the new cultural and social systems would be values of fairness and punishment. In "Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolutionof Fairness and Punishment," Joseph Henrich, et. al. (Science, 19 March 2010, vol. 327, p. 1480 ff.), argue that market exchanges between strangers and religious values were crucial to the establishment of norms of fairness.
Norms that enhance fairness among strangers are likely causally interconnected with the diffusionof several kinds of institutions. Here we focus on two: (i) the expansion of both the breadth and intensity of market exchange, and (ii) the spread of world religions. The efficiency of market exchange involving infrequent or anonymous interactions improves with an increasingly shared set of motivations and expectations related to trust, fairness, and cooperation. This lowers transaction costs, raises the frequency of successful transactions, and increases long-term rewards. Although frequent and efficient exchanges among strangers are now commonplace, studies of nonhuman primates and small-scale societies suggest that during most of our evolutionary history, transactions beyond the local group, and certainly beyond the ethnolinguistic unit, were fraught with danger, mistrust, and exploitation. Thus, we propose that such 'market norms' may have evolved as part of an overall process of societal evolution to sustain mutually beneficial exchanges in contexts where established social relationships (for example, kin, reciprocity, and status) were insufficient...
Recent work has also tentatively proposed that certain religious institutions, beliefs, and rituals may have coevolved with the norms that support large-scale societies and broad exchange. Intersocietal competition may have favored those religious systems that galvanize prosocial behavior in broader communities, perhaps using both supernatural incentives (for example, hell) and recurrent rituals that intensify group solidarity. Consistent with this view, analyses of ethnographic data show that the emergence of moralizing religions increases with greater societal size and complexity." [P. 1480.]
The authors report on a set of experiments, undertaken in an experimental program, they conducted in Africa. African subjects played three different kinds of games to measure behaviorial fairness. Money is allotted to a player or players, who are then asked to divide it among a group of players, if they wish to do so. Who gets donated money and how they allocate it is analyzed across fifteen populations differing by production economic base and residence.
The results "...indicate that people living in small communities lacking market integration or world religions--absences that likely characterized all societies until the Holocene--display relatively little concern with fairness or punishing unfairness in transactions involving strangers or anonymous others. This result challenges the hypothesis that successful social interaction in large-scale societies--and the corresponding experimental finds--arise directly from an evolved psychology that mistakenly applies kin and reciprocity-based heuristics to stranges in vast populations, without any of the 'psychological workarounds' that are created by norms and institutions..."[Pp. 1484-4.]
I have several thoughts about this research. First, it is interestingly materialistic and Marxist. It makes the sociology of material conditions the functional instigator for the evolution of cultural norms of fairness and punishment; i.e., sociology precedes culture. In line with this perspective, religion appears as an ideological structure to rationalize and normalize ad hoc arrangements that appeared functionally in market exchanges.
Second, it provides a conceptually useful scheme for getting unintentional market exchange behavior conducted with fairness to evolve by natural selection out of behaviors resulting from interaction of stranger populations. We can imagine several societies coming into conflict, for instance, by following changing food supplies or coming upon the same needed natural asset at the same time. Over time, a variety of different interactions between these societies could be tried (fighting for sole control of an asset, trying to find relatives in the other society to share the resource, dividing the resource along different lines, cooperatively managing the resource, etc., and trading with each other for the resource). Fairness exchange models might predominate if they were superior in providing resources to each group and so emerge accidentally and functionally, in line with natural selection.
Third, historical records do not record a simple progressive evolution toward integration and cooperation of organized, large-scale societies through norms of fairness based on market exchange. Rather, the earliest records document state formation, conflict between states, and the efforts of state rulers to internalize markets and to appropriate their surplus to buttress rulership. Market exchange exists within the states, from earliest Egypt, through ancient Greece and Old Testament societies. Exchange between states appears to have existed through state sponsorship and tolerance, and notions of fairness gripped within rulers' interests.
If we go back before historical records, to village and city formation in the early Neolithic era, there is considerable evidence that violent conflict was a constant feature of life. It is plausible, as some research has indicated, that human groups originally coalesced into villages for self-protection against other, warring, human groups. It is quite likely that human occupation of the planet from the Neolithic to today has continually witnessed internecine conflict in defiance of market exchange notions of fairness. Market exchange fairness might have required the triumph of the state to provide a social arena free from base conflict in which to emerge. Early states were always empires in which diverse kin groups, tribes, social aggregations, and cultures were collected and controlled. Witness the emergence of unified Egypt or the Kingdom of David.
It is likely that large-scale governance structures had their own norms of justice--indeed, earliest records of the Middle East describe justice as giving the king his due, which is a notion of fairness (the king provides security in exchange for taxes etc.). It is also a justification for appropriation by the ruler of the profits of property and trade. It might be the case that this kingly definition of justice was an expansion of market exchange notions of justice (fairness); but it is just as possible that market exchange notions of justice were derived from kingly definition of fairness.
Fourth, the market fairness concept hypothesizes a rather complete break between mechanisms for social interaction with strangers in small-scale society and large-scale society that is unlikely to be sustained in future research. Given the genetic, as well as behaviorial, basis of kin and reciprocity systems of social organization of small-scale societies, it is unlikely that the effect of genetics simply disappeared with the onset of the Holocene or were swamped by extreme changes in material circumstances. Behaviorial fairness is a part of higher primate society in-group behavior. Surely, it would be the foundation for social relations with strangers, evolving out of the uncertainty, danger, and exploitation of competition-based arrangements. Evolution doesn't work by completely jettisoning the old. Old structures are retained in slow modification while assigned new functions by natural selection. We should expect, therefore, that value structures (in my sense) of the old system of social integration persist in transformed form as the foundation(?) of the new system.
Question. Can market exchange behavior be conceptualized outside of the competition-cooperation and conflict-accommodation scales? Why aren't first exchanges among strangers something else?
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