THE BEHAVIORAL EXPERIMENTS USING THE public goods and the ultimatum games decisively prove that Machiavelli’s self-interest premise was wrong. It is simply not true that all people behave in entirely self-interested manner. Some people—the knaves—are like that. However, other kinds of people, whom I have called the saints and the moralists, behave in prosocial ways. Furthermore, different societies have different mixtures of self-interested and cooperative individuals. Cultural practices (for example, the harambee system) and social institutions have a strong effect on whether and how
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