The Little Old Lady Experiment, Revisited

Back when I wrote about the Little Old Lady Experiment, some folks were a bit skeptical.  Cynical, perhaps, or perhaps even correct.  After all, in a personal account in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, a Montreal police strike on October 17, 1969 resulted in robberies, murders, and riots within hours [Video], dispelling the author's own personal belief in anarchism.  It's hard to argue that our basic state is a moral one (not to mention what it says about a belief in anarchism and lack of authority as a sociological ideal).

And yet, how often is our world not one of violence, compared with the results of a single, specific event?  How often do we prefer such a world to a world without violence?

Furthermore, the Little Old Lady Experiment was only formulated as a thought experiment.  It's easy to dismiss something with a lack of evidence or empirical data to back it up.  My only source was the "Bagel Man" in Freakonomics, after all.  Such a queer title, indeed, makes it easy to toss it aside without further scrutiny.

But it turns out there have been similar studies.  I was surprised to come across this mention in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, has enlarged upon a fruitful line of thought experiments originally suggested by moral philosophers.

...

The message of Hauser's book, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: 'Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems.  As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.'

...

Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you should save the child...

...

Ninety-seven per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden...

These "ninety-seven percent" numbers refer to a series of trolley problems (in an interesting synchronicity, my previous post talks about trolley problems) and were conducted not only in Western culture, but in native Central American communities with culturally-appropriate substitutes.

Sadly, Mr. Hauser has very recently been accused of scientific misconduct related to falsifying data in another, unrelated study.  Hopefully this does not discredit his earlier academic work or methods in general.

In another validation of what I have been blogging, it tickles me to read in The God Delusion that reciprocal altruism is very real in the biological world and that its language is "often expressed in the mathematical language of game theory," though sadly it still does not include multiple payoffs despite what I consider to be obvious ("The hunter needs a spear and the smith wants meat.  The asymmetry brokers a deal").

Similarly, this study (pointed out by Mordicai) in the iterative two-person prisoner's dilemma raises attention to Dawkins' supposition that "mathematical models can be crafted to come up with special conditions under which group selection might be evolutionarily powerful" even if he thinks "these special conditions are usually unrealistic in nature."  If the prisoner's dilemma itself is common among competing organisms, there is no reason to assume group selection would not unconsciously evolve as an emerging property among individual organisms, especially sexually reproducing ones (see also koinophilia in reference to the supporting paper).