In the Discourses on the Origin of Inequality, the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagines a hypothetical prehistoric Stag Hunt. Each hunter working alone can catch a hare, but hares aren’t very meaty. Working together a group can cooperate to take down a stag—but only if everyone is committed. If someone spots a hare and decides to go after it, the stag escapes and everyone else ends up hungry.

Economic studies in which university students in the US played simulated versions of the Stag Hunt indicated that at some point, pairs would realize that it was in both of their best interests to commit to hunting the stag and they would fall into “an efficient and cooperative equilibrium.” But it turns out that American university students are not a particularly representative subset of humanity and cannot necessarily grant deep insights into human nature. They are too WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Developed.

When Indian men in the rural northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh played the game, only low-caste men acted like the American students. High-caste men decidedly did not fall into an efficient cooperation.

A case of caste

Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state, and it is notoriously bad at forming cooperatives; villages haven’t coordinated planting schedules, drainage, or sanitation. The population there is about 20 percent high caste and about 20 percent low caste (Dalit, the caste formerly known as Untouchables). The groups share language and geography, so these can be removed as confounding factors when men from different castes act differently in this cooperation game. Their primary difference is cultural.

The largest difference in behavior, and the only difference that was statistically significant, occurred when a high-caste man suffered a loss because he opted to cooperate—he chose the stag but his partner chased the hare. After that, he was much less likely to try to cooperate again than the low-caste men or American kids were. He retaliated.

The economists running the game performed experiments to see if maybe differences in trust or self-esteem between the castes could account for the results; they did not. As a general rule, people in high castes are richer and better educated, but this is not as true as it once was and is certainly not true across the board. There are now people from high castes living in thatch-roofed mud huts and those from low castes living in more permanent houses. Even so, education and wealth did not account for the different behaviors, either.

Insulting

The high-caste men didn’t cooperate in this simple game—and presumably don’t cooperate efficiently in more important, real world matters—because they view the loss they incur as an insult. And they retaliate because in their worldview that’s the only way to deal with insults.

This idea was confirmed when participants were given hypothetical scenarios about being harmed socially and asked how they would respond. The high-caste men were much more likely to say they’d react with violence than the low-caste men. All of this accords with previous work indicating that high-caste men are much more concerned than lower-caste men with masculine ideals of honor, meaning responding aggressively to perceived offenses in the belief that that’s what is required to maintain their authority.

Cultures differ in what they perceive as a slight rather than just a misunderstanding, and they differ on how to handle a slight. And that matters a lot. Not cooperating results in everyone having less, but retaliating every time someone doesn’t cooperate results in social dysfunction.

PNAS, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1804639115 (About DOIs).