Free Just Babies by Paul Bloom Page B

meetings, and if enough of us are unhappy, we can beat him up or kill him. But none of this works in societies where interactions are no longer face to face and where individuals or small groups of elites can accumulate grossly disproportionate resources, both material and social. An ambitious hunter-gatherer might have a gang of friends with rocks and spears; Stalin had an army and a secret police, gulags and rifles and thumbscrews. In the modern world, an ambitious and cruel leader driven by status hunger can form a group that dominates a population a thousand times larger. It is no longer so easy for the weak to gang up to dominate the strong (although some have argued that the Internet—being decentralized and somewhat anonymous—is helping to even the score).
    L ET ’ S turn now to adults within our own society. Over the last few decades, researchers in the field of behavioral economics have designed clever and simple games to explore just how kind, fair, and egalitarian we really are.
    The first of these is known asthe Ultimatum Game. The idea is simple. The participant walks into the lab and is randomly chosen to be either the “proposer” or the “recipient.” If she is chosen to be the proposer, she is given some sum ofmoney, say $10, and has the option of giving any fraction of this money to the recipient. The recipient, in turn, has just two options—to accept the offer or to reject it. Importantly, if the offer is rejected, neither person keeps any money, and the proposer is aware of this rule before she makes her offer. The experiment is typically conducted anonymously, as a one-shot game—the proposer and the recipient are in different rooms, don’t know who the other is, and will never encounter each other again.
    Assuming that both participants are perfectly rational actors who care only about money, the proposer should give as little as possible. And the recipient should accept this offer, because $1 is better than nothing, and turning it down can’t lead to a better offer in the future, since the game is played only once. But this rarely happens. The proposer typically offers half or a little less than half of the amount.
    This could conceivably reflect a Robin Hood impulse on the part of the proposer: a belief that an equal split is the right thing to do. But an obvious alternative is that proposers are acting out of self-interest, as they believe that miserly offers will be rejected. And they are right to believe this: in the lab, recipients do reject low offers, giving up a profit so that a stingy proposer gets nothing.
    While turning down low offers is, in some sense, a mistake (the recipient walks away with nothing), the Ultimatum Game turns out to be one of those paradoxical situations in which it pays to be irrational, or at least to be thought of as irrational by others. If I were a selfish individual and knew that I was playing a one-shot UltimatumGame with an emotionless robot, then, as proposer, I would offer the minimum, because I would know it would be accepted. But if I was dealing with a normal person, I would worry that I would have a low offer rejected out of spite. And so I would hand over more money.
    (According to the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, when students in economics classes are put in the position of the proposer, they often offer the minimum, and this works out fine for them because they are playing with other economics students, who accept the minimum. It’s only when these rational proposers play with noneconomists that they are in for an unpleasant surprise.)
    The recipient’s rejection of a low offer also makes sense when we realize thatour minds were not adapted for one-shot anonymous interactions. We evolved in a world in which we engaged in repeated interactions with a relatively small number of other individuals. So we are wired to respond to the lowball offer as if it were the first of many, even if we know, consciously, that it isn’t. The rejection,