Samuel Bowles

Samuel Bowles is an economist whose work in the book connects fairness and cooperation to the design of social and economic life. His research on strong reciprocity and a comparative study of fifteen small-scale societies complicate the assumption that people act only to maximize their immediate material gain: people may punish unfairness without personal reward, and market integration was associated with more prosocial behavior.

Strong Reciprocity and Fairness

Bowles, together with Herbert Gintis, gives the name “strong reciprocity” to the willingness to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior even when doing so brings no personal material benefit. The concept is introduced through indignation over Richard Grasso’s retirement package. In strictly economic terms, anger at the package was irrational for people who had nothing to gain directly from opposing it. Yet, like responders who reject an unfair offer in the ultimatum game, those who objected were enforcing their own sense of a just exchange.

The book distinguishes strong reciprocators from altruists. They need not act from love of humanity; they may simply refuse an arrangement they consider unjust. The collective consequence can nevertheless be prosocial. Ultimatum-game offers tend to be relatively equitable, and the episode suggests that the New York Stock Exchange would face greater pressure to assess carefully what a chief executive is worth. Individual actions that seem materially irrational can therefore produce a collectively beneficial result.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Cooperation

In the late 1990s, Bowles supervised twelve field researchers—eleven anthropologists and one economist—who brought behavioral-economics games to fifteen small-scale societies. The societies included three foraging groups, six societies using slash-and-burn agriculture, four nomadic herding groups, and two small agricultural societies. Participants played the ultimatum game, the public-goods game, and the dictator game, which resembles the ultimatum game but does not allow the responder to reject an offer.

The games exposed a tension between individual protection and mutual gain. A narrowly self-protective player could avoid losses while passing up the benefits of cooperation; a prosocial player might instead offer resources, contribute to a shared pot, or respond to unfairness. In every society, participants significantly departed from the purely rational strategy. Those departures varied across cultures, so the study did not present prosociality as identical everywhere.

Its striking comparative result was that the more market-integrated a society was, the more prosocial behavior its members displayed. Participants from more market-oriented societies made higher offers in the dictator and ultimatum games, cooperated more in the public-goods game, and showed strong reciprocity when given the opportunity. The book carefully limits the implication: markets may not teach people to trust, but they can make trust easier.

Cooperation as a Designed Problem

Bowles’s research sits within a broader argument about how rules shape collective outcomes. In an experiment by Angela Hung and Charles Plott, sequential marble draws encouraged participants to follow earlier guesses, even when a private draw suggested another answer. When payment depended instead on the accuracy of the group’s majority decision, participants paid more attention to their private information. Individual guesses could become less reliable while the group’s judgment improved. The experiment illustrates why incentives and decision procedures matter: collective intelligence depends on whether people can contribute distinct information rather than simply echoing those who spoke first.

A related problem appears in the public-goods experiments of Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter. Four players each began with twenty tokens and played four rounds. A contribution cost its contributor one token but gave 0.4 tokens to each member of the group, producing a total group gain of 1.6 tokens per token invested. If everyone contributed all their tokens, each would finish with thirty-two; if no one contributed, each would keep twenty. Although participants initially contributed about half their tokens on average, contributions fell as players observed free riding, and by the final round 70 to 80 percent were free riding. Together with Bowles and Gintis’s account of strong reciprocity, the experiment makes cooperation a question not only of individual character but also of incentives, fairness, and the mechanisms through which groups respond to one another.