Available from the Products and Services feature (right hand side of page) is a bookmark in pdf form that states 10 principles of misinformation. The first one relates to a topic recently discussed, that we are misinformed on what is natural or normative.
In Systems out of Balance I report on a version of the Travelers Dilemma game that a cultural anthropologist played with his college students and with Mayans that he studied. This game involved the decision of how to split unearned money (much like stock). Students steeped in economics tended to choose a lopsided split of 99:1, thinking their partners should rationally accept free money no matter how small. However, these splits were rejected by the partners out of some quaint notion of fairness and consequently no one got anything. Other students not enlightened by economic dogma tended to split the capital 50:50. Mayans tended to split the capital 49:51, giving their partners a slight advantage. Those primitive cultures truly are ignorant, aren’t they? However, the offers of the Mayans and the unenlightened Americans were, of course, accepted by their partners and these people were better off than those steeped in economics.
Can experiments such as the Travelers Dilemma be viewed as truly natural? No, but they are connected more to what is natural than beliefs thought up in armchairs from the Enlightenment to the present. Since the Enlightenment we have been fed a steady diet of our inherent natures and what is natural that has been steadily flawed. Elites are the ones most likely to believe this misinformation, and they are the most likely to spread it. Yet the middle class places a gullible trust in what experts and authoritarians tell us. Couple this with a tendency to become what people perceive you to be, and the misinformation on what is natural becomes self-fulfilling. Yes, we are a greedy culture, including the middle class, all the more pity that we become this in spite, not because, of our inherent nature.
