Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T18:15:22.698Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Weird people, yes, but also weird experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2010

Nicolas Baumard  and
Dan Sperber
Nicolas Baumard
Affiliation:
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PN, United Kingdom. [email protected]://sites.google.com/site/nicolasbaumard/Home
Dan Sperber
Affiliation:
Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 75005 Paris, France. [email protected]://www.dan.sperber.fr/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While we agree that the cultural imbalance in the recruitment of participants in psychology experiments is highly detrimental, we emphasize the need to complement this criticism with a warning about the “weirdness” of some cross-cultural studies showing seemingly deep cultural differences. We take the example of economic games and suggest that the variety of results observed in these games may not be due to deep psychological differences per se, but rather due to different interpretations of the situation.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 33 , Issue 2-3 , June 2010 , pp. 84 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cappelen, A. W., Hole, A. D., Sorensen, E. O. & Tungodden, B. (2007) The pluralism of fairness ideals: An experimental approach. American Economic Review 97(3):818–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronk, L. (2007) The influence of cultural framing on play in the trust game: A Maasai example. Evolution and Human Behavior 28(5):352–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ensminger, J. (2002) Experimental economics: A powerful new method for theory testing in anthropology. Theory in economic anthropology, pp. 59–78. AltaMira Press.Google Scholar
Frohlich, N., Oppenheimer, J. & Kurki, A. (2004) Modeling other-regarding preferences and an experimental test. Public Choice 119(1):91–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hagen, E. H. & Hammerstein, P. (2006) Game theory and human evolution: A critique of some recent interpretations of experimental games. Theoretical Population Biology 69(3):339–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heintz, C. (2005) The ecological rationality of strategic cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(6):825–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C. F., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., McElreath, R., Alvard, M., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Henrich, N. S., Hill, K., Gil-White, F., Gurven, M., Marlowe, F. W., Patton, J. Q. & Tracer, D. (2005a) “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(6):795–815; discussion 815–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lesorogol, C. (2007) Bringing norms in. Current Anthropology (48)920–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oxoby, R. J. & Spraggon, J. (2008) Mine and yours: Property rights in dictator games. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 65(3–4):703–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D., Cara, F. & Girotto, V. (1995) Relevance theory explains the selection task. Cognition 57(1):31–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed