[ecmendenhall]

Here's another ungated Henrich paper on ultimatum games across societies, if you're interested in the research: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001...

His book "Why Humans Cooperate" is worth a trip to the library, too. It combines some formal models, experiments, and an interesting study on the Chaldean community in Detroit (a less-WEIRD ethnic group in the middle of our WEIRD society).

The implications of this research are even more radical (and controversial) than the article suggests. The idea that culture shapes the way we think and act is interesting enough, but then the big question becomes "where does culture come from?"

Henrich (and others[1]) suggest that culture evolves through Darwinian processes of transmission and replication, and that biological and cultural evolution are coupled. Social Darwinism and sociobiology gave this idea a bad reputation, and the idea that our social norms have evolved from kin selection all the way up to impersonal market exchange is still a hard sell for economists and anthropologists alike. But it's a fascinating idea, and it's completely changed the way I think about economic behavior and human cooperation.

[1] "Not By Genes Alone" by Boyd and Richerson is another great book on this subject: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo361...