Radical framing effects in the ultimatum game: the impact of explicit culturally transmitted frames on economic decision-making

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks 'knowledge synthesis', is poorly supported by 'theory', has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. 'culture', 'social learning', 'cumulative culture') in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous 'grand challenges' emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.

Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures

Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites. Across games, results suggest that gods' moral concerns do not play a direct, cross-culturally reliable role in motivating cooperative behaviour. The study contributes substantially to the current literature by testing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioural and ethnographically rich methods.

An evolutionary game study of cockroach control strategies in residential households

Cockroach control in Beijing's residential households is supported by the local government previously but now it is paid by the residents themselves. Under the new residential household cockroach control strategy, the evolutionary game theory is applied in this study to construct an evolutionary game model for the choice behaviour of both PCO (Pest Control Operation) enterprises and the local governments under government regulation. The evolutionary stabilization strategies under different situations were suggested and the key factors for the evolutionary game behaviour were analyzed through Matlab simulation. It was found that the benefits and costs of the local governments' promotion for the cockroach eradication activities, the incremental benefits of PCO enterprises through government publicity and the subsidies for the activities, and the additional costs of PCO enterprises to participate in cockroach eradication activities are the key factors. The incremental benefits from the publicity of the activities and the government subsidies can be used to incent the PCO enterprises' activities, which may be failure without the government promotion. This study confirms the decisive role of the strategic choices of PCO enterprises and the government for effective cockroach eradication activities. Therefore, before the campaign is launched, it is necessary to take into account the economic benefits of PCO enterprises and the public interests of the governments so that the game system can evolve out of the "ineffective" and undesirable "locked" state and evolve towards the ideal state, while would be a basis for other anti- pest efforts.

Preferences and constraints: the value of economic games for studying human behaviour

As economic games have spread from experimental economics to other social sciences, so too have critiques of their usefulness for drawing inferences about the 'real world'. What these criticisms often miss is that games can be used to reveal individuals' private preferences in ways that observational and interview data cannot; furthermore, economic games can be designed such that they do provide insights into real-world behaviour. Here, we draw on our collective experience using economic games in field contexts to illustrate how researchers can strategically alter the framing or design of economic games to draw inferences about private-world or real-world preferences. A detailed case study from coastal Colombia provides an example of the subtleties of game design and how games can be combined fruitfully with self-report data. We close with a list of concrete recommendations for how to modify economic games to better match particular research questions and research contexts.

Mapping the terra incognita of economic cognition will require an experimental paradigm that incorporates context

Researchers, including Boyer & Petersen (B&P), commonly use experimental economic studies to draw their conclusions. These studies conventionally strip away context and present participants only with abstract rules. Because context is a strictly necessary component of the decision-making process, it is not clear that inferences about high-level folk psychological concepts (e.g., rationality) can be drawn from decontextualized economic games.