Do Risk and Time Experimental Choices Represent Individual Strategies for Coping with Poverty or Conformity to Social Norms?

This study revisits a debate played out in Current Anthropology as to whether subsistence decisions are the result of individual strategy to cope with poverty and increase wealth (advanced by Kuznar in 2001 and 2002) or conformity to social norms (advanced by Henrich and McElreath in 2002)—a debate that mirrors discussions within the behavioral sciences about individual versus social learning and within the social sciences about agency versus structure. This study, set in southwestern Madagascar, goes beyond previous investigations by examining the influence on choices in simple risk and time preference experiments of multiple measures of income, wealth, status, and need, as well as conformity at three nested levels: ethnicity (Masikoro, Mikea, and Vezo), village, and clan. Logistic regression models found that both wealth and income variables and social group memberships predict choices, where the best-fit model, evaluated with the Akaike Information Criterion, combined income and either ethnicity or village. The coinfluence of strategy and conformity on economic decisions suggests that humans habitually balance individual goals against social pressures. Equating wealth effects with individual learning and rational choice or equating ethnic effects with social learning and bounded rationality erects a series of false dichotomies.