We Aren’t the World (2013)
psmag.com
psmag.com
Imagine that instead of $100, they give you $10.000 and things change. Would you refuse $1.000 free money even if someone earns $9.000?. Hardly.
But this is exactly what is happening. With 1000 euros/month I live like a king in some parts of South America,like Argentina, but I live badly in Europe, the cost of living is way higher.
There is a link to the published paper in the article[1]. I have only skimmed it, but there are many different studies and findings. One I think is really interesting is this:
"Research on IQ using analytical tools from behavioral genetics has long shown that IQ is highly heritable, and not particularly influenced by shared family environment (Dickens & Flynn 2001, Flynn 2007). However, recent work using 7‐year old twins drawn from a wide range of socioeconomic statuses, shows that contributions of genetic variation and shared environment varies dramatically from low to high SES children (Turkheimer et al. 2003). For high SES children, where environmental variability is negligible, genetic differences account for 70‐80% of the variation, with shared environment contributing less than 10%. For low SES children, where there is far more variability in environmental contributions to intelligence, genetic differences account for 0‐10% of the variance, with shared environment contributing about 60%. This raises the specter that much of what we think we have learned from behavioral genetics may be misleading, as the data are disproportionately influenced by WEIRD people, and their children (Nisbett 2009)."
What they are arguing is that we have conducted science in a way where we have consistently sampled from a specific sub-population and used the results to generalise about the remaining sub-population. To me it sounds like they are on to something that could change many of the "givens" that are "known to be true". I recently saw a TED talk with Paul Johnson[2] where she discusses the problem that the sex of subjects in medical trials is often ignored leading to results that only holds for men or women.
[1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_johnson_his_and_hers_healthc...
To properly compare the cultural differences in the test, it would have to be done with the same level of purchasing power. That's not really stated one way or the other in the article. $100 goes a lot further in a developing country than a developed country, so if they were using the same dollar amount (I doubt they were), then it isn't a directly comparable study.
For example: Make it $10. The stranger gives me a 1:9 split in their favour. Fuck 'em, I'm not going to lose any sleep over a dollar, and it's not worth my time to even collect the dollar. Now make it $10k. Hey, I could actually do something nice with $1k, even if the other person is being 'unfair'. The relative purchasing power of the money in the test is significant within cultures, let alone across cultures.
"The relative purchasing power of the money in the test is significant within cultures, let alone across cultures."
I am not convinced that is correct. A quote from the paper describing the study [1] suggest that the amount of money is not crucial
"Indeed, in the UG, raising the stakes to quite high levels (e.g., three months’ income) does not substantially alter the basic results. In fact, at high stakes, proposers tend to offer a little more, and responders remain willing to reject offers that represent small fractions of the pie (e.g., 20%) even when the pie is large (e.g., $400 in the United States). Similarly, the results do not appear to be due to a lack of familiarity with the experimental context. Subjects often do not change their behavior in any systematic way when they participate in several replications of the identical experiment."
The point of the article is that it is the norm to conduct studies where participants are selected from the same non-representative sub-population, and that this methodology is heavily biased. Rejecting this idea, because you find a possible issue with one of the many studies it is based on, seems like a really bad idea.
[1] "Economic man" in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies (http://authors.library.caltech.edu/2278/1/HENbbs05.pdf)
$400 certainly isn't three months income in the US (~$6900/qtr is the median), as suggested earlier in the paragraph, let alone the 20% split of that.
"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." - Probably far from $100.
* paragraphs 1-5 describe an experiment which makes makes no sense because it appears to ignore purchasing power parity (PPP)
* paragraphs 6-12+ completely ignore the rather obvious PPP objection and go off on a tangent about the lone genius rebelling against authority blah blah blah - a style of writing which makes me increasingly more irritated and skeptical that the author is going to say anything convincing or interesting because he couldn't foresee and address my (and apparently others') immediate objections, which makes me wonder if this was even proofread
I stopped reading at that point because it felt like a waste of my lunch time. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious? I may read further this evening to see if the other 1000s of words have more substance.
That being said, many of these 'experiments' in behavioral economics are silly, in that they capture so little of a real world environment and introduce substantial effects of their own as to be meaningless in terms of real (model driven, hypothesis building, testable, repeatable) science.
I don't think he offered $100. It was probably a much smaller amount.
$100 is way less than "a few days' wages" for most people in the US/EU, right?
And working some more numbers, $100 in a day (full-time shift of 8 hours) would be $12.50/hour. Which works out to $26,000/year. About 48% of individuals earned less than that in that year.
Yet Another Edit (YAE): At $26k/year a single individual with no dependents wouldn't actually be making $100/day. Like the poorer minimum-wage earners, they'd be losing SS and Medicare taxes. At that income they're also paying income tax and not (necessarily) getting it all back (like the minimum-wage earners would). If my brain engages I'll work the numbers for a single individual to actually get to bring home $100/day (ignoring state income taxes).
Note: I'm tired, may be misreading the intro block to the table, but this doesn't seem to be including the unemployed or those under the age of 15 and only those who report income (so those getting paid under the table aren't affecting the percentages).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
This behavior changes as people grow up. As teenagers, people generally won't accept a split worse than 70/30, which implies that it's worth it to lose out on the 30 in order to send a message to the stingy giver. Also, men are more likely to engage in this sort of justice-driven behavior than women, which is all considered economically irrational. But when the stakes get very high they tend to outweigh people's ethical notions of fairness.
Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea, and there are now increasing efforts to broaden the samples of human beings used to investigate general human characteristics. Cross-cultural validation was considered very important in studies of personality psychology even before this paper was published,[4] for example.
Anyway, this perspective comes easily for me, as an American who has lived in a non-Western country for six years of my life (with knowledge of the language, the classical literature, and the traditional culture). Definitely the United States is not the center of the Universe. The study authors referred to people from Western cultures, who were Educated, and who live in Industrialized, Rich, Democracies as "WEIRD" people, and of course that acronym marks out a minority of the world population. I am part of that minority, but I have seen how non-Western, (then) less educated people lived as their country made a transition from being agricultural, poor, and dictatorial to being industrialized, rich, and democratic, and along the way the local culture changed as local conditions changed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5282343
[2] 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...
[3] http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/
[4] http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=103...
Yes, this became especially clear to me personally while working in Asia during the Second Gulf War. In the U.S., people (mainly hand-wringing liberals like my circle it must be said) shrilly intoned "What is the rest of the world going to think of us?!"
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, they simply weren't thinking about us. Yes, we came up in the news sometimes, with respect to specific political issues. However, that invasion ("war") on the whole had no direct bearing on Taiwan.
What's weird about American culture includes how convinced we are that everyone is looking at us as if we were the sun and the rest of them planets. I'm convinced it's leftover pride from the so-called world wars and it's been vented as a means of social control for the industrial military complex. ("We're the cops of the world, boys.")
It also includes the fact that we go around the world measuring everyone else. When was the last time a bushman from New Guinea wandered into your office park and administered a psychological test to you and your co-workers?
Going deeper, what's truly unusual about us is that we expect to discover or create a system that explains everyone else. E.g. we expect to find atomic-level principles that direct the behavior of every other culture out there as if our investigations into natural science should be a template for social values the world over.
> Plainly, basing psychological research on subjects who are mostly undergraduates at United States universities is not a good idea
Good for what, or whom? The original BBS article shows that a slew of psychological results, even those from the most robust subfields like perceptual processing, are not so universally constant as they were previously assumed to be. From the point of view of a particular paper on the processing of visual illusions, for instance, this is bad news insofar as it violates the data from that paper; and bad insofar as models based on that data will now require an asterisk.
I maintain that this isn't a bad thing. In the grand scheme, it would obviously be better if models of cognition that grew out of psych research were 'correct' and took into account all relevant issues from the very start, so that (for instance) we knew that environmental geometry would give rise to perceptual foreshortening and lengthening effects in one case and not another.
But this isn't the way the logistics of the field works; and the 'increasing efforts to broaden the samples' you mention is still an infinitesimal drop in the bucket in 99% of the cases. I work in the psych department of a major research university and I'll tell you that screwing down the demographic requirements of our investigations would not lead to fuller and more apt models, it would lead to an utter absence of the experiment to begin with, as we lack the money to ship in enough !Kong tribesmen and Mongolian sheepherders to round out our sample. And even if we could somehow get all those folks, it would lead to the utter absence of most experimental effecss: the results of such disparate effects, for reasonable sample sizes, would look like noise.
Fine, you might say; you shouldn't be doing science anyway, that's the whole point -- it's not science if you're skewing your investigation so heavily. But considering the logistical realities, and the cultural and institutional history that led to the emergence of an infrastructure for the pursuit of the scientific enterprise in the first place, it doesn't seem so bad to have a body of 'rigorous' knowledge that can then be amended, and indeed that is rigorous enough for its practitioners to realize, in response to surprises, that it ought to be amended.
To come back to the article, we have years of research on the ultimatum game where subject behavior under various manipulations has been carefully mapped out; and the existence of these precise results on this admittedly WEIRD dataset are why we can see departures from those results and take note of them; and think about how different cultural constructs might account for the violations of the model; and think about how we might adapt the model in response.
Put more briefly, having a lot of data on a small and unrepresentative population is a useful tool in the quest for building good models, so long as we realize, from time to time, the ways in which the models are inadequate.
It appears to me that it's calling out the particular pitfalls of the Silicon Valley mindset being rubber stamped on the rest of the world in terms of design and engineering. But this isn't that new - it's been commented upon before at length (e.g. logical optimistic young engineer's view of the society via building a social network).
But it's probably wider than this. I think it's actually speaking out how we collect samples, data. We expect that 10000 people in one area to think the same as 10000 people in another area, even if they are in the same administrative country and the same geodeomographic characteristics. What matters for some behaviour is culture. Games and experiments could be looked at culturally rather than just geographically.
What should we take home for this? I think probably two things, that we are different from the rest of the world, and that the world has variation within it. To take this into account could be a new form of responsiveness.
Basically, most technology stimulates people to think and act more like Westerners.
Also, taking this into account is raising the bar very high for SV, where most companies already have problems recognizing the minor differences between them and fellow Westerners.
I'm still waiting for the first major American service to understand the differences between language, nationality and geography...
It seems that platforms like 4chan provide the capability for more of a "group-think" than platforms like Facebook, even though platforms like Facebook propose that they assist in connecting large swaths of diverse people.
>The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families.
Their living situation is one where they are all essentially family. There would be big social impacts on costing your family money, because of some perceived issue with an unequal split.
They are likely all going to spend 'together' anyway. They are probably bewildered why this weird foreigner doesn't grasp this basic fact, and is forcing them to go through some bizarre ceremony to get the money.
a) the villagers know each other.
b) the researcher is the stranger.
those are the teams, researcher vs players, not player one vs player two. when would it make sense to refuse the split, punish a neighbor, and let the stranger keep his money? never.
The thrust of the article is not "this one tribe is an anomaly in how we think and judge", but rather "it turns out that the biggest anomaly is the people in the USA". Up until now the model formed from looking at 'Westerners' has been assumed to be 'the norm' or even how we are physically wired, and unchangeable. Any observed deviations from the model are anomalies and interesting. The novelty here is that actually, things may be the other way around.
Most such experiments carried out in 'the west' are done with strangers. This is a non-trivial difference.
Go to the Ozark mountains in Arkansas and find a small cluster of cabins in the hills where the inhabitants are all family and rarely venture away. Offer the uncle and his nephew the same deal, suddenly the same 'anomaly' will show.
He was saying that if you aren't careful you won't create the same standards when you go to a community. If 30 of us live together and you come in to do a study that is completely different from sampling from a population of tens or hundreds of thousands (as would occur in most Western studies).
Visual lines, as quickly glossed over in the article, are different for westerners used to square corners... but this is hardly news. The idea that your environment shapes your perceptions goes back at least as far as 1970, when Blakemoore & Cooper did their vertical/horizontal line experiment on kittens: kittens raised in an environment where they only ever see vertical lines cannot later perceive horizontal lines and vice versa.
And the idea that moral reasoning is somehow genetic? What kind of craziness is this? Throw a brick and you'll hit a family whose children have quite different moral reasoning to their parents. Or between neighbours. Same for the other features of socialisation that they mentioned.
At one stage the author even mentioned that Westerners are the product of "thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies". A thousand generations ago, we hadn't even reached the Neolithic period, let alone 'thousands'. This part of our history isn't particularly well known for its trading culture.
It just seems strange that these guys are painted as anthropologists, yet find it surprising that social aspects of the human are different in different cultures.
THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task.
Here is the nub that annoys me about the article. Accounting for the influence of culture is a difficult one - doing a study in your home city is considerably easier than doing it against a representative slice of world cultures. However, recognising the influence of culture on social actions (like the 'fair money divide' or moral reasoning (particularly moral reasoning... I'm still gobsmacked the author even suggested it was genetic)) is something we've known for a very long time, yet the article paints it as 'astonished everyone'.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good point to make, that studies done on any aspect of the human condition can vary between cultures and that that's often overlooked, but it really isn't as astonishing as the article makes out.
And even the layperson should be able to tell that moral reasoning isn't genetic.
I mean, let's keep it in context of the article: they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic.
If moral reasoning were genetic, then you wouldn't have people losing or changing religions, and there'd be no such thing as social movements. The article isn't talking about subtle effects on individuals from serotonin levels, it's suggesting that it was generally accepted that 'wide cultural differences' were genetic, and that the researchers in question were taking an unusual path in thinking they weren't genetic.
This might be true if genes completely determined morality, but I don't think anyone is saying that, as you allude to in your first paragraph. The fact that exercise can affect strength doesn't mean that genes don't play a very large part in the range of strength a species can have. The main thing I was objecting to in your initial comment was the idea that it's so obvious that genes and evolution have nothing to do with morality that even someone with no training (a layperson) can see that[1]. That is to say, you seemed to be advocating pure nurture, yourself.
[1] Not to mention the existence of lots of popsci books and essays on precisely the subject of morality being strongly affected by our evolutionary history.
PDF: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
NB: The paper is not free from the publisher, pdf is hosted on author's website. DOI merely provided for the benefit of folks using citation managers. How I long for bibdesk on linux.
His article discusses the fact that American and European boardgames reflect the cultural differences they were designed in. If you know the terms "Ameritrash" and "Euro game" you know what I'm talking about.
As a board game hobbyist, I'm glad that people are looking at and talking about this research. I'm curious to see if there's a brave soul who can design an awesome, fun game that provides players with a distinctly different set of difficult choices that's neither Euro nor Ameritrash.
[1] http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.ca/2014/04/game-design-outsi...
1. Are there two players, or three? If the offer is refused, the researcher keeps the money. The researcher almost certainly doesn't care, but how the other participants perceive the role of the researcher is likely to influence their idea of fairness.
2. Is the money a gift from one participant to another, or are they dividing up a gift from the researcher? This difference will also trigger different responses, some of which may be related to fairness and some not.
Of course, any experiment might tell you something interesting. But trying to say this is a test for fairness is an oversimplification.
I also find it intriguing that even as we finally identify that cultures may in fact be profoundly different and not merely superficially different, which calls the entire liberal idea of fundamental American evil into question by cutting away the most foundational assumptions it is based on, the author still can't resist leaping to the assumption that Americans are somehow wrong. It's most clear in this bit: Is my thinking so strange that I have little hope of understanding people from other cultures? Can I mold my own psyche or the psyches of my children to be less WEIRD and more able to think like the rest of the world? If I did, would I be happier?
I'll accept the last question as at least a bit of humility, but, well, before one goes socially engineering one's own child, shouldn't we first explore this matter more deeply and ask whether it's even a good idea? And the idea casually underlies several other bits of prose, too. It will take long to purge this poisonous idea from academia, but perhaps now we can finally start.
This is deeply revolutionary stuff if academia actually comes to accept this (to the point that I would not be surprised this becomes one of those "the old guard must die before this can be accepted" sorts of things), and even as the article sort of brushes on this topic, I don't think it really captures just how foundational the assumptions this destroys are. It's not merely a sort of accepted doctrine of modern academic liberalism, the fundamental lack of diversity in human cognition is one of the most foundational foundations, sunk so deep that you can't even notice it unless you go looking.
One of the worries I think would come up is the fear that this might turn into a new judgment of which cultures are "better", but this article does, thankfully, already get into the right of thinking about that question, which is, better for what? Dropping a comfortable western person into a primitive, tribal environment and watching their maladaptive behaviors has long been a topic for movies, for instance (even if it is usually followed up by Mighty Whitey storyline [1]... follow that link if the phrasing concerns you, the racist overtones of that phrase are quite deliberate and derogatory of what it is describing). Cultures are different for reasons, and "better" requires context... but, correspondingly, so therefore does "worse".
[1]: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey
Look at this image:
http://i.imgur.com/kR94sqv.jpg
Not only does it blow by the character limit, it goes right off the end of my screen. These problems are fixable. I'm not advocating a complete overhaul, but how many times have you mistapped / misclicked on a vote button and not been able to reverse it? How come there is still no way to collapse threads? Very basic things.
It's caused by the non-breaking spaces (Unicode character U+00A0) in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685599
A CSS workaround to read this page:
.comment {
display: block;
max-width: 800px;
}To wit, the variations of this quote attributed to many authors since the 19th century:
> America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/07/barbarism-decadence/
In truth, social scientists (bar the usual suspects, aka economists) have long observed that Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, think and behave quite differently from people from other cultures.
You can trace the observation, for instance, all the way back to the beginnings of sociology, psychology, social psychology and anthropology in the late 19th/early 20th -- and you could certainly trace it to colonial times if you accept vague and annecdotical observations from people living at the time as further evidence.
There's also a steady stream of comparatitive studies on the topic since the 1970s, as highlighted by another poster.
So to me, the revolutionary bit has nothing to do with "new facts"... the revolutionary bit is if it established to the point where current orthodoxy can no longer resist it.
And in the meantime, as someone who truly enjoys science in its real form as a permanent, ongoing intellectual revolution rather than a servant of the orthodoxy, the staggering vista of quantitative research this opens up into the diversity (the real diversity, not the political kind) of the human experience is incredibly exciting. There's rich veins of knowledge to be mined here with modern technology and techniques.
And I'd make that meta-reply in general to a lot of the other comments... yes, frankly the general gist of this has long been obvious to anyone with an independent mind who takes a look out at the world around us, but if it's so obvious, why has the scientific orthodoxy not matched that? The surprise expressed in this article is real. And I mean that as a true question for thought and examination, not mere snark. It's a rich question, about science, about how science works, about history, all sorts of things. Books could be written on it, and probably will be.
Then we can find some lines along which cultures might differ and be said better or worse. For example adaptability is likely an important feature. The physical health of people is also different, and there I think American have much to improve.
I don't know why I feel I need to stop here. It reminds me about pg's essay about things that can't be said. Sadly I'm not bold enough to walk through this minefield.
I hate to complain, especially when I really do love this site and the community, but if someone is going to edit a headline, at least make it an improvement.
It's so sad that academics in the social sciences fields are terrified to ask honest questions that they might not like the answers to.
I guess that's the reason that social sciences get disrespected so heavily.
The funny thing is that the REAL question that these people don't want to face is "Are these differences more than just cultural? Are they genetic?"
They'd as soon ask that question as a Baptist congregation would seriously ponder Occam's Razor and a need to posit a deity.
I always find the hostility some HN members have towards the social sciences to be rather weird. Half of what HN is here for is firmly in the bailiwick of the social sciences. A/B testing? Better marketing? Understanding your employees better? Taking care of yourself so you don't burn out? All of this stuff is the much-maligned social sciences.
Some people have this stereotype that all psychologists are touchy-feely hippies, and they're really not.
Did you read the article? These researchers were legitimately frightened at how their work would be received and in my opinion it's only heretical in a minor way... AND THEY'RE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS!
I always find the hostility some HN members have towards the social sciences
Yeah, that's why my original post (that in a computer analysis context wouldn't have raised an eyebrow) is being moderated into the dirt.
Please don't do those things on Hacker News.
I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.
--Blaise Pascal
Only if you consider American to describe a particular set of genetics does this question even make sense.
edit: Western and American are not descriptions of genes. Unless Westerners or Americans cluster in their responses to a test based on how closely related they are, this "question that these people don't want to face" is code rather than honest question.
It's not about having the exact same genetics.
For example, it might be about sets of genes or functionally equivalent sets of genes that function in a similar manner despite appearing in members of ostensibly different "races".
The article mentioned that students are chosen for these experiments. Maybe students self-select for having particular genetic sets so you end up with homogenous-enough results that are going to differ radically from the results obtained from genetically isolated groups in other parts of the world.
You start talking about genes, and people panic and worry that you're talking about race. Genes are more complex than that.
If we were talking about whether flaws in a computer system were because of the data fed in, the software running it, the hardware, or impurities in the silicon -- we'd all be very clinical and think about it rationally (minus a few Linux/Windows/Mac flames).
But when talking about analyzing basic differences in people, there are elements in the community that can't even hear the blasphemy.
Sadly, this is why the social sciences will never make progress. A fear of really looking in and doing the Science is why the social sciences will always resemble a cargo cult in its lack of real value.
Go ahead, mod me down until this text is one with the background. It won't improve or validate your religious-like belief system because it just isn't good Science.
But... I wonder how much of this is an effect of an inability to see some things about other cultures, because of political correctness?
Some differences are just shocking to modern westerners.
If you have read a bit of mideaval history, you realize there are some similarity between traditional clan cultures and modern organized crime families; e.g. the lack of humanity assigned to outsiders. This is not possible to discuss, since some places on the planet still have similar societies.
Another example is that tolerated pederasm (greek/roman style) is not gone from the planet. It is hard to know, since it isn't really discussed even by e.g. NY Times.
(All these are obvious examples from my own media, yours might be different.)
From Wikipedia:
Pederasty or paederasty (US /ˈpɛdəræsti/ or UK /ˈpiːdəræsti/) is a (usually erotic) homosexual relationship between an adult male and a pubescent or adolescent male. The word pederasty derives from Greek (paiderastia) "love of boys",[1] a compound derived from παῖς (pais) "child, boy" and ἐραστής (erastēs) "lover".
Where is the comparison to other more civilized people like Europeans, Asian countries, Africans, or even Russians.
The article seemed to blur the lines quite a bit; I thought the original question was justified and not worthy of downvotes. (why are we downvoting people that ask questions, or maybe, just maybe, misunderstood something?)
And I didnt see any data from what happens when they did the "money game" with Europeans, Asians, Africans, even developed South Americans.
"Recent comparative work has dramatically altered this initial picture. Two unified projects (which we call Phase 1 and Phase 2) have deployed the Ultimatum Game and other related experimental tools across thousands of sub- jects randomly sampled from 23 small-scale human societies, including foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and subsistence farmers, drawn from Africa, Amazonia, Oceania, Siberia, and New Guinea"
Respectively,
(a) Religious beliefs differ between countries and if someone believes that "sharing" is better than "self-interest" that will effect the outcome of this "game." This could help to explain why this country is relatively poor.
(b) $100 in the U.S. is equivalent to significantly more in this country...
(c) If everyone is very poor and you are very poor you're in the same boat, if your neighbors would be angry that you took $100 and left them out to dry this could be pretty bad for you. Even if this is not the case, you feel bound to these people and you likely don't want to "screw them over"
(a) Not everyone in the US is religious; and of those that are, not all religious people think of sharing in the same way. I think it would be difficult to say religion in the US is what causes people to split more equitably. Also we do not know the beliefs of the foreign populations in the article.
(b) In both cases it was a meaningful amount of money. The article stated it was worth a few days pay in one of the countries, $100 is about 2 days pay at minimum wage in the US.
(c)I think your point here speaks to the psyche of American's that the author writes about. It would be interesting to perform the game within "only poor" sample groups and "only wealthy" sample groups inside the US.