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Comment by smelendez | Hacker News Reader

> Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money.

I get the sense they tested the game with (for the local economy) large amounts of money in small towns, where participants probably already knew each other.

That's a very different scenario than most American iterations I've known of the game, with college students who probably don't know each other playing for relatively small amounts of money.

Nickle-and-diming your random classmate out of 10 cents is very different from taking a week's pay that could have gone to your neighbor.

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Is there actually research of the same game being played amongst a group of poor Americans? Sure, with trivial numbers in a lab. But going to a poor neighbourhood and playing with money equal to a week's wages?

I would not recommend "going to a poor neighborhood in America" and trying to run such a game. It would quite likely be illegal.

Why?

Poor neighborhoods, especially urban ones, get pretty familiar with scams and money games. This is that "cultural inheritance" the authors are talking about.

This is not a zero-sum game for the neighborhood. So if you don't conduct the study quickly, you risk the participants identifying each other and agreeing to collaborate to extract the maximum possible gain from the outsider.

On the other hand, if you plan to show up and run the game quickly, you'll need to have a lot of cash on hand to pay out. (You are paying out on-the-spot, aren't you?) You're going to risk drawing a crowd. The police will likely take an interest in what's drawing the crowd and this scheme will look a whole lot like gambling.

Or you could perhaps go to the police first and tell them what you're doing. There's nothing sinister going on.

Yes, or pay lawyers to contact the right people at City Hall and bless what you're planning to do. You may be expected to get permits, provide insurance or something like that. Loads of fun.

This a reason why we have systems of permits and legal requiremnts for businesses: to discourage folks from "going into" neighborhoods and running all kinds of whacko money games on-the-spot and leaving behind a tangled mess of people angry about money owed. Without any regular procedure to enforce the perceived contracts people just go banging on each other's doors and yelling for their money and the cops eventually get involved anyway.

You may be expected to get permits, provide insurance or something like that.

Doing psych studies properly does include this kind of crap - they'd be no strangers to beaurocracy, having had plenty of experience with ethics committees.

I did a little over one year's worth of a PhD in cognition and physiology and gave up for my own reasons. But even if I was raring and to go, I could never have actually started testing subjects, as the relevant ethics committee only met once a quarter and they kept blocking my tasks for truly trivial reasons, different each time and never mentioned in the previous judgement. If your supervisor was at the committee, they could say "we'll alter that minor point" and you'd be fine, but if not, it was "please reapply for consideration next time". Yeah, in three months. I do not miss the politics of academia one jot.

One example of a blocked task was 'Does not state is complying to electrical standard Foo'. Which is a very reasonable statement to make, as part of the task involved using EEG electrodes. But the task was set to be conducted in their own university, on a floor wholly wired to specifically meet standard Foo, and one of the supervisors at the committee was a bloke who used exactly these labs for a similar thing. No dice, fuck you, come back in three months.

So yeah, getting permits isn't something new :)

Yeah. I think probably getting approval from the police would be easier than the IRB.

I reckon the Machiguenga know all the ways to suck in an anthropologist by now.

My first thought as well. I for one would have no qualms with accepting a scandalously unfair 10% of a $10M amount in cash.

That's not the point. The point is, different cultures had wildly different point that they saw as "fair". Hunter-gatherers might a large share - first in, best dressed, and the loser is content with picking over the carcass. Other societies (which emphasised gift-giving) would consider a 60% offer insultingly low. Americans saw 50% as fair.

Actually, the article says that the gift giving culture rejected 60% because it would entail a future obligation to the giver.

According to the article the participates remain anonymous to each other.

Anonymous, but still within a relatively small group.

There was also another party in the game whose identity was known well enough: word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money

I believe part of GP's point is that, for some sizes of village, there may not be any chance that your counterpart is a stranger. If your counterpart is not a stranger, even if you don't know their exact identity, you might choose to play more generously.

The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families.

You're saying the family would never talk about this strange newcomer and his odd games and what he got me to do?

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