BEHAVIOR

OVERVIEW
7
However, human sociality implies that behavior is also
influenced by social expectations, social recognition,
patterns of cooperation, care of in-group members,
and social norms. Indeed, the design of institutions,
and the ways in which they organize groups and use
material incentives, can suppress or evoke motivation
for cooperative tasks, such as community development
and school monitoring.
People often behave as conditional cooperators—that
is, individuals who prefer to cooperate as long as others
are cooperating. Figure O.4 shows the results of a
“public goods game” that was played in eight countries.
It demonstrates that although the proportion of conditional
cooperators versus free riders varies across countries,
conditional cooperators are the dominant type in
every one. In other words, in no society where this
behavior has been studied does the canonical theory of
economic behavior hold (Henrich and others 2001).
Social preferences and social influences can lead
societies into self-reinforcing collective patterns of
Figure O.1 Automatic thinking gives us a partial view of the world
To make most decisions and judgments, we think automatically. We use narrow framing and draw on default assumptions and associations, which can
give us a misleading picture of a situation. Even seemingly irrelevant details about how a situation is presented can affect how we perceive it, since we
tend to jump to conclusions based on limited information.