Spite

Abstract: Existing models of intertemporal choice normally assume that people are impatient, preferring valuable outcomes sooner rather than later, and that preferences satisfy the formal condition of independence, or separability, which states that the value of a sequence of outcomes equals the sum of the values of its component parts. The authors present empirical results that show both of these assumptions to be false when choices are framed as being between explicitly denned sequences of outcomes. Without a proper sequential context, people may discount isolated outcomes in the conventional manner, but when the sequence context is highlighted, they claim to prefer utility levels that improve over time. The observed violations of additive separability follow, at least in part, from a desire to spread good outcomes evenly over time. Decisions of importance have delayed consequences. The choice of education, work, spending and saving, exercise, diet, as well as the timing of life events, such as schooling, marriage, and childbearing, all produce costs and benefits that endure over time. Therefore, it is not surprising that the problem of choosing between temporally distributed outcomes has attracted attention in a variety of disciplinary settings, including behavioral psychology, social psychology, decision theory, and economics. In spite of this disciplinary diversity, empirical research on intertemporal choice has traditionally had a narrow focus. Until a few years ago, virtually all studies of intertemporal choice were concerned with how people evaluate simple prospects consisting of a single outcome obtained at a point in time. The goal was to estimate equations that express the basic relationship between the atemporal value of an outcome and its value when delayed. Although the estimated functional forms would differ from investigation to investigation , there was general agreement on one point: that delayed outcomes are valued less. In economics, this is referred to as "positive time discounting." Although plausible at first glance, the uniform imposition of positive discounting on all of one's choices has some disturbing and counterintuitive implications. It implies, for instance, that when faced with a decision about how to schedule a set of outcomes, a person should invariably start with the best outcome, followed by the second best outcome, and so on until the worst outcome is reached at the end. Because nothing restricts the generality of this principle, one should find people preferring a declining rather than an increasing standard of living, deteriorating rather than improving health (again, holding lifetime health constant), and so on. In the last few years, several studies have independently fo

Abstract: Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms - "strong" and "weak" reciprocity - that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free- riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a "narrow" and a "wide" reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in "real-world" situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation "in the wild." In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing.

Abstract: In spite of the great importance attached by social capital theory to the role of social trust in maintaining stable and effective democracy, research has produced rather weak and mixed support for the idea that the socially trusting individuals tend to be politically trusting, and the weight of evidence suggests either a weak or insignificant relationship between social and political trust. The present work, however, reports robust and statistically significant correlations between generalized social trust, on the one hand, and confidence in political institutions and satisfaction with democracy, on the other. The associations are significant in 23 European countries and in the United States. This article argues that its findings are more accurate and more reliable than much of the previous work because they are based on better and more sensitive measures. The results pose a dilemma for future survey work, while reopening possibilities for social capital research.