Cruel to Be Kind: Effects of Sanctions and Third-Party Enforcers on Generosity in Papua New Guinea

P nowhere in the world is the norm of generosity more pronounced than in Melanesia. Whereas purchase, via either money or barter, tends to be the dominant mode of resource acquisition in much of the world, apart from self-generated production, the generosity norm manifested primarily through gift-giving operates to provide people in most Melanesian societies with many of their resource needs (Sillitoe 1998). In some cases, the generosity norm dictates obligatory exchanges necessitated by ceremonial occasions that are highly structured in form and value; in others, the exchanges are unsolicited and variable with respect to time, place, and value.1 Regardless of form, Paul Sillitoe (1998) argues, the norms of generosity and gift-giving are so pervasive and intrinsic to the basic social, political, and economic structure of Melanesian society that individual acts of “gift-giving” should instead be referred to as “sociopolitical exchange.” The origin and maintenance of generosity norms, however, is problematic. In neoclassical economics, the central discipline concerned with understanding the basis of resource exchange, individuals are expected to be hyper-rational—to have knowledge of not only their own preferences (“utility functions”) but those of all others with whom they interact (Young 1998). Moreover, given this knowledge, individuals are expected to exhibit exchange strategies that are utility-maximizing for themselves—that is, to use those strategies that maximize their personal payoffs (Kreps 1990). Indeed, the notion that people exhibit “self-regarding selfishness” (Tracer 2003) underlies the “Nash Equilibrium” in game theory—the fundamental concept that the optimal solution to any “game” (n-person exchange situation) is reached when all participants are playing a strategy such that no individual can further increase his or her payoff by changing it unilaterally (Camerer 2003). The notion that exchanges are n-person games in which each person selfishly attempts to maximize payoffs at the expense of others would seem, at face value, to preclude the idea that individuals would ever behave according to a norm of generosity—providing for others, either in solicited or unsolicited fashion, at a cost to themselves. Apart from economics, the discipline of anthropology is also concerned with the establishment and maintenance of social norms, and for anthropology the existence of prosocial generosity norms is no less problematic. In place of the Nash Equilibrium, rigorous anthropological models of behavior are based on the concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), a dominant strategy that cannot be supplanted by any invading alternative strategies given that others do not change their strategies (Maynard Smith 1982). The modeling of prosocial behaviors has Chapter 7