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How Culture Influences How We Choose to Cooperate
Would you leave food for others in your community's pantry?
Posted February 17, 2021
If there were a common pantry area, kind of like a continuous potluck, in your housing society where you could leave food for others out of goodwill and take the food others have kept, would you take more stuff than you leave?
Most of our social behavior — from climate change to COVID-19 compliant behaviors — requires us to cooperate with others. In other words, our social worlds are dependent on our collective behaviors. However, the extent to which we cooperate with others is dependent on our cultures. That is, based on what your cultural background is — what your values, politics, and traditions are, for example — your answer to the questions above change.
What is a fair amount of food for you to leave versus for you to take? If you had to be very selfish, you could take all the leftovers and leave nothing, and if you had to be very cooperative, you could leave leftovers, and take nothing. What do you think is the fairest amount of leftovers that you take and leave? The answer to these questions often change based on our culture.
Let us look at what culture is in this context: It is essentially collective behavior and is usually a response to our environment. We usually calibrate our beliefs and actions to our environments. For instance, imagine yourself in the world of The Hunger Games. You know that you do not have a lot of resources, and you need to compete for the little resources you do have to get out alive. Your answer to what is a fair distribution of the food changes — if you try to be very fair, you are likely to die! Now imagine yourself in the world of Bling Empire. You have all the resources in the world now, and a few food items won’t make a dent for you. If you try to be very selfish, you will be left with even more food than you can typically consume!
Thus, it is likely that, in general, societies that are resource-rich are likely to be fairer in cooperative scenarios. That is exactly what one study found across different types of societies. They assessed whether a community is likely to buy things from a market (which implies that they engage in long-term relationships with people beyond their families), they are more likely to be fair, compared to if they use homegrown products (such as fishing for their families or growing their own vegetables). Then they tested whether people are likely to cooperate with others in their communities. They found that people living in communities that are less market-integrated tend to offer less of their common resources to others. This means that a person in The Hunger Games universe would be more likely to keep the food for themselves.
Let us consider another example: Would you punish someone who does not leave food for the community kitchen? In the same study, researchers found that smaller communities are least likely to punish. This may be because, for smaller communities, the damage to your reputation is likely to matter more. If you live in a small community where you know everyone, it is likely that the damage to your reputation might be more costly to you. On the other hand, if you live in a larger community, you may not know everyone who lives there, and vice versa. This also means that you are more or less anonymous, and reputational damage may not affect you much.
Now think of a third example: Would you punish someone who leaves a lot of food in the kitchen? If you were the type who would leave too little in the community kitchen in the previous example, it is likely that someone else would have punished you for it. So to retaliate, a revengeful you may punish them back for being too nice. In other words, if someone leaves the same amount of, or more, food in the community kitchen as you, and you punish them, it is called antisocial punishment.
Antisocial punishment also varies from culture to culture. For example, people from Muscat are likely to spend more money to punish antisocially. People from Boston, on the other hand, spend very little to punish others antisocially. Why might there be such a difference? Again, our environment. In societies where the rules of civic cooperation are weak, people tend to punish more antisocially. That is, if you are from a culture that thinks tax evasion or not paying fares in a public bus is not a big deal, you are likely to punish antisocially. It also matters whether your society is a well-functioning democracy. People from such societies are less likely to punish antisocially.
Now, what does this all mean? So what if you leave more or punish those who leave more? Cooperation, as mentioned, is the backbone of our collective social behaviors, and therefore, it is important for any social scientist to understand. Let us consider our COVID-compliant behaviors. If you are from a culture where people are likely to leave more in the community kitchen, it might mean you are cooperative, which might also mean that you stayed at home more. If you are from a culture where people punished you for not leaving enough in the pantry, it might also mean that your fines were high for leaving home for unimportant reasons. If you are from a culture where people punished you for leaving too much in the pantry, it might also mean that you wanted revenge on those who stayed at home all the time.
In other words, how you behave in cooperative games is how you would behave in any social situation. For social scientists, it is also important to then remember that how we behave in critical scenarios depends on our culture, and therefore using North American undergraduates as a proxy for human behavior in general, is a suboptimal use of their money and time.
Arathy Puthillam is a research assistant at the Department of Psychology at Monk Prayogshala, a not-for-profit academic research organization based in Mumbai, India. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social, moral, and political psychology, and answers the question "How do the groups we belong to (e.g., language, religion, political party) affect us?"
