War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

Experiments employing the public goods and similar games have now been conducted by many teams of investigators in many countries. In some studies, stakes were very high—equivalent to three months of salary. The general result is always the same. A substantial proportion of moralistic subjects always behaves in a cooperative, rather than rational fashion, and many people are willing to incur personal costs to punish cheaters. This is not to say, however, that all social groups are alike in their composition with respect to knaves, saints, and moralists. College students, for example, tend to be more cooperative than subjects coming from less-educated and poorer social strata. Graduate students in economics, on the other hand, tend to behave more selfishly than students from other disciplines (probably because they learn too much about rational choice in their classes!). Most interestingly, the strength of cooperative behavior tends to vary among different countries. Particularly good evidence for cross-cultural variation comes from studies that used the “ultimatum game,” which is simpler to set up and cheaper than the public goods game.