Sharing, punishment, and culture

Brainethics has a summary of a recent Science Magazine article about cross-cultural sharing behavior. The study set up three different sharing scenarios, then examined how cultures with different values with respect to sharing behaved:

These results demonstrate that there is a positive relationship between the likelihood of accepting an offer (i.e. the level of willingness to punish small offers) and the willingness to share (i.e. altruism). In other words, in cultures where you are expected to share, you give more, even though others have no way to threaten or punish you.

The authors of the article argue that these different levels of cooperation across different cultures must be the product of evolution: "Alternative explanations of the costly punishment and altruistic behavior observed in our experiments have not yet been formulated in a manner that can account for stable between-group variation or the positive covariation between altruism and punishment."