Rise and fall of competitiveness in individualistic and collectivistic societies

Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Herein we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societie...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 110; no. 23; p. 9305
Main Authors: Leibbrandt, Andreas, Gneezy, Uri, List, John A
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 04.06.2013
Subjects:
Adult
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Biological Evolution
Brazil
Competitive Behavior - physiology
Cooperative Behavior
Fisheries - methods
Games, Experimental
Humans
Learning - physiology
Male
Middle Aged
Regression Analysis
Social Environment
Statistics, Nonparametric
Brazil
endogeneous preferences
social learning
field experiment
ISSN:1091-6490, 1091-6490
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Herein we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societies where local natural forces determine whether fishermen work in isolation or in collectives. We find sharp evidence that fishermen from individualistic societies are far more competitive than fishermen from collectivistic societies, and that this difference emerges with work experience. These findings suggest that humans can evolve traits to specific needs, support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role for individual competitiveness, and provide evidence how individualistic and collectivistic societies shape economic behavior.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1300431110