ICCI Home: Are variations in economic games really caused by culture?

Last month, Science published an research article by Joe Henrich et al. showing that market integration and participation in world religion covary with fairness ('Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment'). The team had people from various societies play experimental economic games in which a sum of money given by the experimenter has to be distributed in various ways. The results are presented as supporting cultural evolution theories and contradicting the hypothesis that successful social interaction in large-scale societies arise directly from an evolved psychology. This conclusion might be a bit premature though.