Imagine, for a moment, that a researcher has given you £100. In order to keep any of this money, you must first give some of it to a stranger. You can give away any amount, but if the stranger declines your gift, deciding you’re sharing too little with them, neither of you can keep the cash. How much would you give away? The chances are, you’d give away around half.
In 1994 Joseph Henrich, now a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, travelled to the Peruvian Amazon to conduct a version of this experiment with the Matsigenka, a remote community of slash-and-burn farmers. Henrich, who was a postgraduate anthropologist at the time, assumed the Matsigenka would respond much like the average New Statesman reader, and that the experiment might illuminate some psychological truth about our innate conception of fairness and our willingness to punish injustice.
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