This is precisely how contracting shops work in the IT industry in the US. They keep the bulk of the money and pay the contractor just enough that he does not walk away from the deal.

The bit about offering more than 60% in gift-giving cultures and having the other player still reject them is surprising. What would explain that?

Maybe it is even worse this way: you get indebted to an unknown person!

I don't get that.

If someone offered me a dollar out of his million, I'd accept it and be very grateful.

And yet, from a strictly economic perspective, that's a fundamentally terrible decision. Not only will you lose $100, but you'd lose tons of time you could be working talking to the police, testifying in court, etc.

Similarly, if you take the $100 and are silent, and protect the killer, you risk severe punishment if you are caught. Even if I agree that the decision is made based on moral conscience for most people rather than economic calculation (which might be the case for sociopaths), there is a rational basis for this. Fundamentally, to make sure that I don't get murdered myself by the murderer later, I better not comply with him, as he is proven to be ruthless. In addition, because other people are moral beings as well, $100 is a very small compensation for risking jail and being shunned for the rest of your life, a very bad economic decision.

    > Human beings are irrational and sometimes do things that
    > aren't in their economic best interest out of principle
    > or ethics.

You also said

    > Think about it: if I murder somebody, then offer you $100
    > not to tell anyone, would you take the money? I certainly
    > hope not.

Either way, it sounds like we agree that there's a social contract that may cause individuals to act in a manner that isn't immediately economically advantageous.

The issue is that you have unspoken assumptions - Its just some guy giving you a buck, no other costs/strings or concerns to deal with. Take buck, move on.

Now lets say you are in a gift giving culture, or even better, a "high-context culture".

Whose giving you the money? A buck? From a millionaire? Are there strings attached? Nothing is free so whats going on?

So on and so forth.

>>" “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”"

I'll try and explain the counter point: Lets say you me and the researcher are playing this game. The researcher ponies up $1m and asks you to split it with me. Now, I view $1 million as the total gift. I also think you and me BOTH bring something to the table:

a) You: The decision making - which you value at $xa.

b) Me: The veto powers - which I value at some $ xb. The closer $(1m-xa) is to my xb, the more I want to do business with you. The farther apart the numbers are, I feel like you are not respecting the value I bring to the table. I don't want to do business with people that don't value my skills and respect my power.

I'm thinking that the Machiguenga and you don't really see (b) - you just see you at zero and anything above that as yay! Nothing wrong with that. I get that thinking too. Its the basis of the article - Americans are not the world.

Keep in mind that the experiment is not framed as "Person A is giving you $X out of his money" but "Person A chooses the split that you and he get from the researcher's money." If it were marketed as a gift, responses to the experiment would probably be very different (including my own response.)

It's pure evil.

Neither player has any right to the money until the game is over and the game isn't over until they've both made a decision. That's the difference between this game and a millionaire offering you money. You may be lucky to be offered anything in both cases but in one you are being screwed in the context of the game. It's a matter of returning the favor. It may not be the most economically sound decision but if the amount lost isn't significant to you, it doesn't matter.

> It's pure evil.

"markdown took $99 of $100?! He caused me to lose money. He's pure evil." No. It's not my money to lose but I don't like the way you played the game so I'll pass on the $1, thanks.

Why? Do you really consider it worth $100 to you just to prevent someone else from getting $9900, or do you just value $100 so little that you are willing to round it down to $0?

I can imagine real-world scenarios in which I might spend $100 worth of my time to try to address a problem, especially if I think that problem might affect others. (Scenarios involving an actual $100 seem even less likely, but plausible for a sufficiently egregious wrong.)

However, as a game, I'd call it free money no matter the amount; neither player did anything in particular to earn the money other than taking their time to play the game, and I don't see it as even slightly unfair of the first player to offer less money to the second, so I don't see any value in "punishing" the first player. The first player happened to get the better opportunity, and the second player gets to choose between having something or having nothing. In the game version, I'd place zero value on how much the first player gets.

Now, if I thought I could bluff the first player via advance communication into believing that I'd reject the offer if less than a certain amount, I'd certainly do it; however, if they called the bluff, I'll take what I can get.

Not the original commenter. But yes to both.

Look up multi-round games. Strategies fit for single-round games don't work in multi-round ones. Many of our strategies and heuristics are meant for multiround games, which is what most life interactions are.

By overanalyzing the experiment and treating it "just" as a experiment, imho, you are actually defeating the point of the experiment. ymmv, just my 2 cents and other disclaimers.

Let's say I tell you I have an idea for a company. It's a really cool idea and if we realize it we will make boatloads of money. I need your help to realize it. If you agree, you will get 20% of the company. If you don't, we won't realize it and neither of us will make any money.

Do you accept? If not, why not?

Almost no one on HN will agree. (I predict.) Ideas are easy. Even I have ideas. Doing something with the idea is what counts. That starts with programming, but also involves selling product and running the company. So unless the idea-person has a great record of implementing great ideas and good exits people will be unwilling to lumber themselves with a lot of work for so little return.

Would your answer be the same if I said I'd keep 9,999,999.99 and gave you only a penny. Would the value of punishing me be so low that now you'd consider to do so, or is it still free money and the absolute value doesn't affect you personally?

I know this might destroy the purpose of the experiment, but frankly, they just need to take that into account.

Over here in the good-ol UK I set my rate (which the customer knows about) and my agent tries to get as much on top as they can, but AFAICT (and I have relatives who are agents) the split is usually around 80-20. Which is still a lot of cash just for fixing me up with work...

I get the sense they tested the game with (for the local economy) large amounts of money in small towns, where participants probably already knew each other.

That's a very different scenario than most American iterations I've known of the game, with college students who probably don't know each other playing for relatively small amounts of money.

Nickle-and-diming your random classmate out of 10 cents is very different from taking a week's pay that could have gone to your neighbor.

This is not a zero-sum game for the neighborhood. So if you don't conduct the study quickly, you risk the participants identifying each other and agreeing to collaborate to extract the maximum possible gain from the outsider.

On the other hand, if you plan to show up and run the game quickly, you'll need to have a lot of cash on hand to pay out. (You are paying out on-the-spot, aren't you?) You're going to risk drawing a crowd. The police will likely take an interest in what's drawing the crowd and this scheme will look a whole lot like gambling.

This a reason why we have systems of permits and legal requiremnts for businesses: to discourage folks from "going into" neighborhoods and running all kinds of whacko money games on-the-spot and leaving behind a tangled mess of people angry about money owed. Without any regular procedure to enforce the perceived contracts people just go banging on each other's doors and yelling for their money and the cops eventually get involved anyway.

Doing psych studies properly does include this kind of crap - they'd be no strangers to beaurocracy, having had plenty of experience with ethics committees.

I did a little over one year's worth of a PhD in cognition and physiology and gave up for my own reasons. But even if I was raring and to go, I could never have actually started testing subjects, as the relevant ethics committee only met once a quarter and they kept blocking my tasks for truly trivial reasons, different each time and never mentioned in the previous judgement. If your supervisor was at the committee, they could say "we'll alter that minor point" and you'd be fine, but if not, it was "please reapply for consideration next time". Yeah, in three months. I do not miss the politics of academia one jot.

One example of a blocked task was 'Does not state is complying to electrical standard Foo'. Which is a very reasonable statement to make, as part of the task involved using EEG electrodes. But the task was set to be conducted in their own university, on a floor wholly wired to specifically meet standard Foo, and one of the supervisors at the committee was a bloke who used exactly these labs for a similar thing. No dice, fuck you, come back in three months.

So yeah, getting permits isn't something new :)

There was also another party in the game whose identity was known well enough: word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money

You're saying the family would never talk about this strange newcomer and his odd games and what he got me to do?

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...

"In the tropical forests of New Guinea the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member. In contrast, the nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually delivering the semen through the initiate’s anus, not his mouth. The Etoro revile these Kaluli practices, finding them disgusting."

Or, as someone years ago suggested, "Psychology is the study of the psychology of Psychology undergraduates."

E.g. > Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.

I remember living in India as a teenager and being confused by how rarely if ever kids in my school would display emotion on the spot when something happened. The response would come up later and it was as immature as teenagers everywhere but on the spot responses were polite.

Large amounts of cash = take whatever is offered.

Repeat experiment with a billion dollars. I offer you say 50 million, leaving 950 million to myself. Your move. You honestly going to reject 50 million?

It's actually quite rational that they took the money. Now, what would actually be interesting is that if they rejected the large amounts of cash.

I'd probably offer you a lot less if it were real - say 10-15 million.

Seeing as you work in the oil industry - the above statement does strike one as being exceedingly odd. You are in the industry for the money aren't you?

That's some serious cognitive dissonance you've got there.

Furthermore, I thought you guys pumped misery out of the ground day in, day out?

Not really. In case you are interested, I am in the industry by accident.

>I thought you guys pumped misery out of the ground day in, day out?

No, we pump oil. And gas. By and large, these things are used to create a whole lot of happiness.

Damn, now even I'm thinking I'd turn that down to teach your selfish ass a lesson.

You're confused because you're thinking about this (selfishly) as money being granted to you, and expecting your partner to do the same. Your parent (pun intended) is considering the whole relationship: Money will be redistributed from a researcher R to A and B only if A and B can agree on a fair distribution method. This will alter the balance of power between these three agents at a minimum. A and B should agree to this only if they both feel it is globally optimal; the more unfair the distribution A chooses, the more likely that this change is for the worse overall, which places increasing moral pressure on B to veto.

That's hardly fair... but I need the money => Accept.

I don't need the money, but it's fair => Accept.

It's unfair, and I don't need the money => Turn down.

> Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money. The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies. So Henrich had no problem finding volunteers. What he had great difficulty with, however, was explaining the rules, as the game struck the Machiguenga as deeply odd.

>the Machiguenga’s 20-soles stake equals about 2.3 days’ pay from the logging or oil companies that occasionally hire local labor. To match this amount, I set the UCLA stake at $160, which is about 2.3 days’ pay for a graduate student working as a “reader” ($9 –$10 per hour after taxes).

However, this still fails to take into account the decreasing marginal utility of "2.3 days' pay". The typical UCLA student is wealthy enough that 2.3 days' pay is not a big deal (AFAIK most US students only work in the summer?), while for the Machiguengos an additional 2.3 days' pay might be a lot.

His book "Why Humans Cooperate" is worth a trip to the library, too. It combines some formal models, experiments, and an interesting study on the Chaldean community in Detroit (a less-WEIRD ethnic group in the middle of our WEIRD society).

The implications of this research are even more radical (and controversial) than the article suggests. The idea that culture shapes the way we think and act is interesting enough, but then the big question becomes "where does culture come from?"

Henrich (and others[1]) suggest that culture evolves through Darwinian processes of transmission and replication, and that biological and cultural evolution are coupled. Social Darwinism and sociobiology gave this idea a bad reputation, and the idea that our social norms have evolved from kin selection all the way up to impersonal market exchange is still a hard sell for economists and anthropologists alike. But it's a fascinating idea, and it's completely changed the way I think about economic behavior and human cooperation.

[1] "Not By Genes Alone" by Boyd and Richerson is another great book on this subject: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo361...

it is said for example that the dutch are more price conscious and the french more relations/support minded ...

I didn't find the word "anthropomorphize" in the other document; and the section I found in the original document didn't seem to go into what was said in the associated article. It's a rather long article, and I'll need to read it when I get home; however, the above section doesn't connect with me.

What does "anthropomorphize" mean in this context? I understand the term to mean "to give perceptually human characteristics to". There are only two routes I can follow with this:

1) they mean a human thinking that a smiling animal is a happy animal. And that animals laugh, and grin; and have all the same facial expressions as humans, like one would see in Disney movies.

2) they're suggesting that people in the United States believe that animals continue to have emotions that they can express and other sentient thought, have a sense of desire for certain outcomes to be had, and for genuine fear and happiness.

The second possibility isn't something that only people from the US do, at all. Long before the United States was the apparent urban environment with lost connection with nature (alluded to in the article in some places), Native Americans ascribed many emotions and intentions and ideas to the animals around them, even calling coyotes tricksters; and in Biblical times, calling someone a "fox" had a particular meaning.

In short, where is this article getting the idea that humans don't anthropomorphize animals at all stages of life? That word is VERY confusing to me in this sentence; and to claim that they're using a very limited definition of anthropomorphize, where it's just human facial expressions is to be unfair to the word itself.

The claim seems to be, more or less, that western urban kids interpret animals by projection or analogization of human traits rather than forming categories for the animals, more than kids in (some) other societies do. I have no idea how true that is myself (have not read anything on the subject beyond this article).

Even as an adult, I find that real animals look strange to me. I've seen so many cartoon images of skunks and giraffes and elephants in my life, and even though I know they're cartoons, when I do a google image search and photographs dominate the results, I usually find them quite alien.

Some subconscious part of my brain is totally convinced that a giraffe looks like this . . .

http://www.moho.biz/oskar-the-giraffe/

. . . and doesn't immediately recognize this . . .

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xRmReWpJeJE/T2QxTEZ95_I/AAAAAAAABw...

. . . as the same animal.

I find it excruciatingly odd people hate on large scale cow lots, but seemingly find the mass murder of small animals that live in the same place as grains to be "meh". More rabbits and other cuddly creatures die from combines than all of the evil things we do to cows in feed lots.

I've had to help out cows after they've prolapsed, and also had to help out other cows that have fought each other to near death, animals are not disney cartoons. But I've dated vegetarians and vegans (no offense to anyone there) that seem to have this unnatural viewpoint of our use of animals as food.

I see cartoon cows and can't help but think its similar to lolcats. So far removed from reality that we've anthropomorphized things to the point of ridiculousness. I'll be a bit blunt, after living around cows for 18 years of my life, I really don't have much sympathy for them. They're just as evil as humans are to each other, and they are such herd creatures it isn't funny. The bulls however always seemed to be less skittish, the females, they never acted even remotely rational or consistent. Bring calves into the picture and throw even that out the window. The bulls just fought and wanted to get into the females areas.

Just to counter your city experience a bit, not trying to say feed lots are a good way to mass produce meat, but I grew up not dealing with any of that. I have zero qualms eating a cow or chicken, but free range is loads better to eat than mass produced. I just see them as no different than wheat or other plants to be honest.

I didn't mean to be misleading. I agree with you; the strong opinion I developed was that those animals are clearly food. And that some of the excessive compassion spent on them would be better spent on people, who might actually appreciate it.

I grew up in the pacific northwest, surrounded by a lot of examples of Inuit art. The captions always said something like, "This one is an orca," and I always thought, "If you say so!"

But I think Mickey is even more distorted! I can easily imagine someone from another culture reacting that way to the claim that he was a mouse.

I don't have a problem recognizing real mice because I've interacted with them a lot. But animals for which my only frame of reference is cartoons, well . . . my expectations of the real animals can be downright embarrassing.

I'd imagine my mental models of them would fare better if I weren't surrounded by miles and miles of endless civilization.

But why would people without contact to "food animals" anthropomorphise them out of all things, not think of them as dumb food containers like plants? In the end, both end up shrink-wrapped in a supermarket. I know that my non-farmer, omnivore friends are basically saying this. Have I just picked friends that are more resistant to Disney movies than the general population? :)

From what I gathered, the difference is that, urban kids (why is it urban kids?) relate to animals by relating them to humans; whereas elsewhere, animals are related to other animals.

To quote the original article, "inferences are asymmetric, with inferences from human properties to mammals emerging as stronger than inference from mammals to humans, and (3) children’s inferences violate their own similarity judgments by, for example, providing stronger inference from humans to bugs than from bugs to bees (Carey 1985;1995)." emphasis mine.

If this is what the submitted link is talking about, I don't believe that's anthropomorphism.

Because children who grow up in rural areas generally have more contact with wild animals and livestock so they develop 'healthier' attitudes towards animals at a younger age. I have a friend who grew up on a farm and had to slaughter chickens as one of his chores. He sees it as nothing to kill an animal to eat it but a lot of his and my friends who grew up exclusively in the city or suburbs cannot imagine such a thing.

EDIT

$100 isn't necessarily a few days wages for those who are working in a well paying full time position but for a college student that could mean a few days of going out.

Imagine yourself playing the game but with $1,000 (or more) on offer. Would you refuse $300 to punish your partner for keeping $700? Now change the amount to $10. Would you refuse $3 to punish your partner for keeping $7? Now switch it around: how much of the money, $1,000 and $10 offers, would you give to your partner?

When the stakes go up, your partner is screwing you harder. He's not just screwing you out of $2 or $20, he's screwing you out of $200 or $2000.

Fuck him.

But I would claim that in "WEIRD" societies, we're constantly engaged in a game of iterative prisoner's dilemma with a string of strangers. So you're not forgoing your gain for nothing: you're forgoing your gain for one round to ensure equitable treatment in future rounds.

It's like a two-layered prisoner's dilemma.

First, imagine the simpler dilemma: you have to players, the Chooser (who chooses the split) and the Decider (who decides to take it). You just play the same game over and over again, choose and decide, choose and decide, with no role switching. If you're the Decider, you could settle for a 30-70 split, but over the dozens or hundreds of iterations that's a lot of money lost. It's worth it to forgo some short term gain to keep the Chooser in line. Eventually you end up with a 50-50 split, and your profits are maximized.

In the second layer, imagine you have two pools of Choosers and Deciders. In each game, a Chooser and a Decider are randomly matched up. In this game, you might imagine there's no incentive to forgo short-term gain for long-term, but there is. The trick is that you -- the Decider -- are not just in a Dilemma with your Chooser on each round, you're also in a Dilemma with your other Deciders.

Imagine you have two Deciders, A & B, who have each been offered the same 30-70 split by their Chooser.

If Decider A and Decider B both reject it, maybe on the next round they get each other's Choosers, who then offer them each a 50-50 split. In the long run, their profits are maximized.

If Decider A and Decider B both accept it, on the next round their Choosers might offer them an even worse split. They profit, but far less than before.

If Decider A accepts and Decider B rejects, Decider A profits maximally (next round he gets a 50-50 split from Chooser B, without forgoing any profit) and Decider B profits minimally (he forgoes profit this round and gets a 30-70 split or worse next round from Chooser A).

This is now reduced to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. If the Deciders cooperate (by rejecting bad offers from Choosers they may never see again) they all profit, if they all defect they're all worse off in the long run, and if some defect (and accept the bad offers) while others cooperate they profit even more to the detriment of their good compatriots.

Throwing away $200+ dollars to spite a stranger cheating you out of $200+ more dollars isn't just about spite; it's about forcing them to cooperate with other strangers so you have a better ecosystem of strangers to cooperate with.

But I haven't read the study, so I could be wrong.

Money might be nice in such a situation, but if you're not going to starve to death or freeze to death and you don't have 300k$ in medical debt suffocating you, it might not be as valuable as a couple days extra pay is to a poverty-line worker in the US.

I can tell this is true from personal experience. I spent my early childhood (before starting school at 6) mostly in the countryside, interacting a lot with animals and nature and when I used to interact with other children who've spent all their life so far in the urban environment I experienced a lot the "are they retard or what?!" feeling about their anthropomorphizing interactions with animals, dolls and even plastic toys, that I distinctively remember even now. I imagine that they probably felt the corollary about my competitive-social skills because, as I child, I was never good at "playing for winning" and using winning at a game to establish a higher social status.

This conclusion comes a decade or more too late, I suppose, to affect U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the better. After doing my undergradate work in Near Eastern Culture (or, rather, about 3 credits in) it became apparent that the 'Western ideal' of justice does not translate whole-sale; that certain adaptations are necesssary to improve the human rights situation, as is a great deal of 'soul searching' to determine precisely what would constitute 'improvement.'

I don't want to politicize the discussion too much, but I feel compelled to ask: do you really believe Bush et al. would actually care even if they had access to this research's findings?

I do believe they would. It is in the best interest of the United States to form stable, like-minded governments abroad. If this cannot be reasonably accomplished because of cultural differences, it would be beneficial to at least marginally adapt the strategy to achieve something close to it. Judging from the US installation of the Shah in Iran, the US is not above installing dictators to enrich its own interests.

For the moment.

The situation in Europe is very interesting. There is a strong atheist movement, yet catholics seem to be on a comeback lately, and the mostly muslim immigrant population growing too - and at an even faster pace.

If religion says "go forth and populate the earth", and if atheist have less than 2.1 children, how long until they get outnumber and forced to chance their allegiance by the religous - at gunpoint if necessary? [nobody expects the spanish inquisition :-)]

So I would not base any conclusion on a punctual observation when you have partial derivative pointing to different conclusion in a longer timeframe.

Counter example : if large-scale societies survive fine without religion, how come there are so few of them ? Why do they have a tendency disappear in history, and be replaced by religious societies?

Also, the method of the prisoner game is questionable. The article says the amount was not insubstantial - around several days of work, but does not explain how it was chosen or how it was tested.

I would be very interested to know about the price elasticity of the acceptance rate and the price elascticity of the percentage offered.

I mean, do people in this group have a constant acceptance (fully inelastic - they always accept) or can you get to a point where they refuse because they think it's unfair?

Here's a quick example - go to any fast food join, eat normally, then when you have to leave, prepare the exact amount of cash in one side, and the tip in the other side of the table, and say to server the food was not to your taste, therefore you are leaving only a one cent tip (or a dime)

See if they take the free money, or if they feel so insulted that they refuse. Rince and repeat until you figure the amount they will accept without feeling insulted.

So I really wonder if there could be a cash amount where the remote people from this tribe would react just the same as all of us - which would just point to a calibration problem.

Obviously this has not hurt their population.

When it will be removed (it will have to), I wonder which group will take the most advantage of it and grow faster - the "non religious by western standard" or the various ethnic groups - say in the XianJiang.

Also, the fact that an authoritarian communist country where atheism is promoted still couldn't remove the religious allegiances is interesting. The former USSR tried the same - and failed.

My guess is that it won't, and the religious represent a very significant percentage of the population - until they become the majority.

Without willing to insult anyone, I wonder if a human group growth with religion, they reach decadence with atheism - then stats again, eventually with a different religion, in a loop.

EDIT: the point is not about "cultural group" but religion. Are these minorities becoming atheist, or do they keep some religious self identification? I guess they still identify as such, even if they don't practice. Culture is hard to bring back, but religion can grow back very quickly

Ironically for your point, this issue seems to be most severely affecting the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, arguably the most religious minorities in China.

Well, that escalated quickly.

So you make pretty invalid assumptions here, that we reproduce asexually into identical beings, and more than that, even including our believes. So religious parents have religious children, atheist parents have atheist children. That assumption is totally false.

I had personal contact with atheist being made in religious schools as they reacted strongly, and when others tried to force them to believe, they will find a way to prevail.

My uncle is a teacher and one of the girls in class asked him at the end of the class about God,she was curious as her parents, specially her mother, forbid this girl to know about religion. My uncle answered the question and days later had this furious mother trying her best to fire the teacher. Guess what the girl will do when grows up?

My neighbors are highly atheist, their children decided to baptize and go to church on their own. They respect their children decision.

Bad assumptions, bad conclusions.

But all things equal, is a religious couple more likely to have religious children, or atheist children? Is it more than half the time ? If it is, that's enough to make assumptions, even if counter example exist.

"when others tried to force them to believe, they will find a way to prevail"

Not so. I'm quite interested by the experience of atheists in north africa - how they organize and such. In an oppressive society, atheist have to hide - they don't prevail. Religions in general have a problem with atheism, as mentioned in the article about religion from the same author that was separately posted.

I'm not taking sides here- I'm just trying to figure out the dynamic.

It seems to me that while religions can be self perpetrating, atheism is not, and in the long run, it always ends up replaced by a religion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282707

one of Norenzayan's articles for a general readership about the issue of influence of religion on societies. I invite you to join the discussion there too.

The point is that if they influence other people's children into being atheists too, then the atheist section of the population grows.

If your argument is that an entirely atheist population would eventually die out altogether (having no other children to convert) then I misunderstood, but still that an equilibrium will be reached.

Furthermore, it seems plausible that conversion to a group depends positively on the dominance that group (e.g., more opportunities to be converted as you interact with random others in daily life).

So all else being equal (or unknown), then my money's on the group with the highest birth rate.

I was thinking that "children" may be a function of total population. At least below some threshold people may have more kids than they would otherwise out of a sense of "duty", or the desire for continuation of the species (which seems to be inherent -- people sacrificing themselves to save "the world" usually do it to safe humanity).

If, in reality, people are having children out of a sense of duty to save the world from extinction due to underpopulation then I'm wondering why I didn't get the memo.

Though I think I would need a proper simulation now to see if it works out as I imagine it to work out... :)

Does the relative dollar amount vs the absolute dollar amount affect the ultimatum game?

How does differing income levels affect the results.

It does show the limitations of scientific study and how the studies themselves can be generalized or not having controlled and explored many possibilities that indeed may be factors.

I say squabble because I don't mean fight or be offended. I might argue for the fun of the argument, not the actual value of the money. I wouldn't accept the 10 cents, knowing that we both then got nothing because $1 doesn't mean that much to me.

More on this from an English anthropologist in Debt: The First 5000 Years, a history of money and currency that is exceedingly timely given the current emergence of Bitcoin and Ripple, and the strange survival of the Swiss WIR.

Extrapolated that means that almost all of our current scientific beliefs will be "proven" false or at least considered marred by misunderstanding or lack of data at some point in the future.

Humans can not understand everything, and they never will.

But, there is not a single fact that could not be disproved by more evidence. Even "the Earth is round" could be proven to be wrong and we consider it part amorphous-hyperconical-hypertubular in the future, or perhaps we prove scientifically that we live in a simulation/a game and the universe, shapes, Earth, etc. is a simple allusion, comparable to the blocky pixel graphics in old Atari 2600 games.

Please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

While it is certainly possible that we understand one or more eternal truths that span all that exists in every dimension and every universe, considering the age, maturity, and abilities of the human race, it is extremely doubtful that we have made much progress or that we ever will. Science is great when approached from the standpoint of wonder and discovery, but it is terrible when it comes to "truth". Don't believe me? There is a whole religion devoted to the belief system that many are infected or affected by aliens (Scientology); many accept that this faith is based on a science fiction novel a.k.a. fiction, but many believe it is true. In the same way, many are convinced that science has elucidated truths, even though we don't know that it has or ever will. Yet, you accept science as truth in part. That is an irrational belief because the only way to accept it as rational is to have faith that it is rational. Rationalism is nothing without faith, but faith exists without rationalism.

Probably. But it was the first thing that sprang to my mind while reading the article. In an article titled "We Aren't The World" i would have expected a bit more caution.

People who live in the United States of Mexico (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) are called Mexicans for the same reason.