CULTURAL DIFFERENCES, PALESTINIAN GENEROSITY, AND RUTH’S MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE
IN 2008, REINHARD SELTEN AND I RECEIVED A RESEARCH GRANT FROM the German Science Foundation to conduct a laboratory study of ethnocentrism, the judging of people in other societies solely based on one’s own cultural norms. Along with Palestinian colleagues from Bethlehem University and Al-Quds University, we conducted two experiments involving Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians playing the trust game. Recall that the trust game involves two players, a sender and a receiver. In the first stage, the sender is endowed with an amount of money by the experimenter, from which he can transfer any part to the receiver. For any dollar transferred to him from the first player, the receiver gets two additional dollars from the experimenter. In the second stage the receiver can transfer back any part of his income to the sender.
In the first research experiment we had players of each nationality play the trust game while facing off solely against players from the same nationality: at Bonn University, German players played against German players; at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israelis played Israelis; and at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Palestinians played Palestinians.
Having the players initially play only others of the same nationality enabled us to establish a baseline of trust within each group separately. There were significant differences between the groups. Palestinians exhibited the greatest amount of trust, offering, on average, 66 percent of the money they had to other players. In contrast, Israelis were the least trusting, making, on average, offers of only 36 percent. The German group was in the middle of this ranking, with an average offer of 50 percent.
The players in this experiment played the standard trust game, but we also asked players in the role of receivers to predict beforehand the offer they expected to get from the proposers. On average, these guesses turned out to be surprisingly accurate, within each group. The behavior of the proposers was highly correlated with the expectations of the receivers. Palestinian receivers at Al-Quds were not in the least surprised at the generous offers they got from their fellow students, while the Israeli students at Hebrew University were not surprised at the low offers that their Israeli counterparts tended to give. Apparently each culture has its own internal norms of trust, which are well known to the individuals living within those cultures.
But how exactly did the participants in this experiment learn the norms prevalent in their own cultures so well that they could guess the behavior of the proposers almost exactly? Each of our participants was playing the trust game for the first time ever and had no prior experience in the particulars of that game. We all, however, throughout our lives and on a daily basis participate in interactive situations that may not be precisely identical to the trust game but resemble it in many ways. Our experiences in such situations occur so frequently and are so much more significant than any single play of the trust game that the cultural norms with respect to trust and generosity prevalent in our environments are etched within our intuitions. Having such intuitions is critical for social success. In fact, it may be more important than the ability to analyze situations in which we find ourselves.
In the second experiment we had players from each culture playing against players from different cultures. All the possible cultural pairings were effected: we had Israelis paired with Palestinians, Israelis paired with Germans, Palestinians paired with Germans, Germans paired with Germans, Israelis paired with Israelis, and Palestinians paired with Palestinians. The experiment was conducted simultaneously in Bonn, Jerusalem, and the West Bank via electronic communication. Each player was informed of the nationality of the player with whom he was paired.
Ethnocentrism emerged in full force in this experiment. Players in the role of receivers made the same initial predictions regarding proposer behavior as they had in the first experiment when they were paired with proposers from their own cultures. For example, Palestinians continued to guess that the average offer would be 66 percent even when they were paired with Israeli proposers. Israelis, who were used to receiving far less generosity from their co-nationals (37 percent offers), expected that same low level of trust when paired with Palestinian or German proposers.
What about the proposers? They also conformed to the actions of their own cultures, making more or less the same offers in both the first and second experiments, whether they were paired with players from their own culture or from a different culture. Because the proposers’ offers were the same regardless of the identities of the receivers against whom they were paired, we can conclude that there was no significant discrimination based on nationality.
The absence of overt discrimination here may seem encouraging, but peering a bit further under the surface reveals a less cheerful picture. The innocent behavior of the players in this experiment involved a level of ethnocentrism that carries with it potentially dramatic and even tragic effects. This became clear when Israeli proposers were matched with Palestinian receivers. Israeli norms, as expressed in the first experiment, were for proposers to offer very little (about 36 percent on average). Israeli proposers consistently made such low offers whether the receivers were Israelis or Palestinians.
Palestinian norms, however, involved much higher standards of proposer offers (about 66 percent on average). Ethnocentrism led Palestinian receivers to expect Israeli proposers to make offers in line with that Palestinian norm. They were therefore inevitably disappointed when they saw the offers the Israeli proposers were putting forward. In questionnaires distributed to the participants at the end of the experiment, the Palestinian players explained the gap between what they expected from the Israeli players and what they actually received as an expression of Israeli discrimination against Palestinians. They did not even consider the possibility that the gap was actually caused by different behavioral norms and that the Israelis made the same low offers to their fellow Israeli players. Many of the most dangerous elements of ethnocentrism are caused by our failure to recognize that different cultural norms can exist at all.
An opposite, positive effect was registered when Palestinians were in the role of proposers and Israelis were receivers. In that case, ethnocentrism caused Israeli receivers to expect low offers from the Palestinian proposers, on the order of 36 percent, just as they received from Israeli proposers. They were pleasantly surprised when the average offer they received, 66 percent, was nearly double their expectations. As shown by their questionnaire answers, the Israeli players did not consider the possibility that what they had witnessed was the Palestinians simply behaving according to the norms of their culture. Many of the Israelis considered the offers they received to be an inexplicable positive gesture from the Palestinian players to the Israeli players.
Ethnocentrism exists wherever differences in cultural behavior are encountered. What we haven’t yet considered here is why the Palestinian norm is to offer so much more than Israelis and Germans in the trust game. Why should they have so much trust in others in this game? The high offers the Palestinians persisted in giving Israelis and Germans shows that special feelings of identification with the other students in their universities or Palestinian solidarity cannot be explanations for the phenomena.
I cannot claim to have a convincing explanation. All I can give are speculations gleaned from long conversations with the Palestinian colleagues who conducted the experiment with me, and chiefly Mohammed Djani of Al-Quds University. My colleagues ascribe the generous offers made by Palestinians in the trust game to the differences in the relative importance given to collectivism versus individualism in Palestinian culture. Individualism is still considered to be disgraceful in Palestinian society because individualism conflicts with traditional and religious values. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may also make Palestinians wary of over-individualism.
Failure to reciprocate an act of generosity is considered much more contemptible in Palestinian society than in Western cultures. This leads Palestinian proposers in the trust game to be more generous toward receivers. Surprisingly, ethnocentrism causes Palestinian proposers to expect receivers from other cultures to respond in the same way as Palestinian receivers would, when in fact egoistic behavior is much more legitimate and prevalent in Western cultures.
Spreading Internet usage and economic globalization are accelerating the pace of intercultural interactions. Ethnocentrism might disappear within less than a century, not because we will learn to appreciate the behaviors of people in other cultures but because differences between cultures will nearly disappear. A single canonical model of behavior will be shared by most of humanity. Whoever fails to act in accordance with that canonical model will simply fail to survive, economically and socially. Until that process is completed, however, success will come more easily to those who are aware of their own ethnocentrism and manage to adapt their behavior to the social environment in which they find themselves, even if that means changing what they had been used to previously.
This is especially important when interactions involve negotiations, both commercial and political. As Raymond Cohen argues in his book, Culture and Conflict in Egyptian-Israeli Relations, negotiations break down often because of ethnocentrism rather than substantive differences between the parties. That is what has doomed many of the attempts to bring about a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. Getting to an agreement will require more than just getting negotiators to overcome their ethnocentrism and imagine themselves in the place of their interlocutors. Most of the populations of both nations will need to overcome their ethnocentrism as well. Without broad popular support among Israelis and Palestinians, no agreement will ever be implementable.
My colleagues in the German-Israeli-Palestinian experiment and I conducted another experiment, with the goal of improving our understanding of cultural differences in economic interactions. This experiment involved a new two-way trust game, with two variations.
We called the first version of the new game we developed the “giving” version. The game is played as follows: each of the two players in the game is initially given an equal amount of money (such as $100). Each player then decides how much of this sum she is willing to give to the other player. As in the standard trust game, the experimenter gives a receiving player two dollars for each dollar that she got from the other player.
The two players in this game make their decisions on how much to offer the other player simultaneously, without knowing how much the other player is offering. The total amount of money that a player has at the end of the play of this game is therefore the amount that she kept without offering the other player, plus three times the amount received from the other player. For example, if the first player gave the second player $30 while receiving $20 from the second player then his sum total at the end of the game is $70 + $60 = $130.
The second version of this game is the “taking” version. The game is played as follows: as before, each player is initially given $100. Each player then declares how much money she will take as a “cut” from the original amount of the other player. The experimenter gives each player two dollars for every dollar that remains in her possession after the cut to the other player has been transferred. The total amount that a player has at the end of the play of the game is the sum of what he or she took from the other player plus three times what remained in her possession after the other player took a cut of the original amount. For example, if the first player took a cut of $70 from the second player, while the second player took a cut of $80 from the first player (leaving him with $20), then the first player ends this play of the taking game with a sum of $70 + $60 = $130.
From a strategic perspective, both of these games are identical: the taking game can be reformulated as a two-stage game as follows: in the first stage each of the players takes the entire amount of $100 from the other player and then in the second stage the two of them proceed to play the giving game. But that transfer of $100 in the first stage is meaningless because each player is left with $100 at the end of that stage.
Note that if both players are selfishly rational, thinking only of their own private gain, then neither player will offer the other player even a penny in the giving game, leaving both players at the end with the $100 they started with. In the taking game, if both players are selfishly rational, then they will each take $100 from the other player, leaving both of them at the end with the $100 they started with. These behaviors are exactly the Nash equilibria of the respective games. Given the strategic equivalence between the two games, self-interested rationality dictates that we should expect similar behavior in both games, with nearly identical end results; the games differ from each other only in how they are described. But the results of the experiment were very different. Players behaved significantly differently when playing the giving game compared to their behavior in the taking game. Importantly, these behavioral differences were culturally specific.
My colleagues compared the behaviors of Israeli, Palestinian, and Chinese players in the experiment using the giving and taking games. Each pair of players always involved players from the same culture. Israelis gave relatively small amounts in the giving game, but took large amounts for themselves in the taking game. Palestinians gave relatively large amounts in the giving game but also took large amounts for themselves in the taking game. The Chinese players gave relatively small amounts in the giving game and also took small amounts for themselves in the taking game.
The players in the different cultures had different behavioral characteristics. Israelis placed a great deal of importance on their personal gains. Their behavior was the closest to the behavior predicted under Nash equilibrium. Do not, however, conclude from this that Israelis are generally more selfish than individuals from the other two cultures. We will return to this important point later.
Palestinians, in contrast, were very generous in the giving game while being selfish in the taking game. This hints that Palestinians emphasize nonmonetary considerations, such as expectations of reciprocity, in their decision making. Their behavior was influenced by what they expected others to do, which in turn depended on the detailed way each of the two variations of the game is described. Describing the game in terms that emphasize giving leads to expectations that others will be generous, encouraging everyone to be generous in accordance with the general norm. On the other hand, describing the game as one in which players decide how much to take gives rise to egotistical expectations, which then turn out to be self-fulfilling.
The Chinese players showed a respect for property and a striving to avoid overly generous actions on the one hand and causing harm to others on the other hand. They gave in moderation and in turn took in moderation, preferring as much as possible to end the game with the same amount of money as they received at the start of the game. The behavior of the Chinese players reminds me of stories my father-in-law told about his experiences as a soldier in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War. He would always end each story by repeating the same sentence, which summarized his main insight from the war and possibly the secret of his survival: “Never volunteer and never refuse orders.”
I was not surprised by the behavior of the Israeli players in the taking game. I have had many discussions with colleagues about the consistent phenomenon of Israelis exhibiting much more competitiveness and utilitarian self-interest than individuals from other countries in experimental games. The phenomenon has been noted in a broad range of such games, including the ultimatum game, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the dictator game, and the trust game. This is particularly disturbing to Israeli researchers, who often express discomfort and embarrassment at international conferences when they present the results of experiments conducted in Israel, along with concern that highlighting this phenomenon could serve the interests of peddlers of base anti-Semitic slurs. But do the experimental results really point to a deep-seated Israeli tendency toward competitiveness, excessive greediness, and callous lack of concern for others? I don’t think so.
I believe that the root of this phenomenon is in the dissonance that exists between Israeli individualism on the one hand and the special place that giving and solidarity have in Israeli society on the other hand. In times of crisis, Israelis exhibit a ready willingness to cast aside personal interests and voluntarily join together for mutual assistance that is rare even by the most demanding international standards.
Israeli society could not have survived a bitter one-hundred-year-long conflict if it was composed entirely of greedy individuals, each looking out only for his or her immediate narrow interests. But that only sharpens the question: Why don’t these examples of overwhelming solidarity and mutual concern find expression in laboratory experiments?
The answer, I believe, lies in the high value Israeli society simultaneously places both on solidarity in the face of crises and on individualism and success. It is this combination that is the secret behind the economic, scientific, and technological successes Israel has experienced. Solidarity and readiness to pitch in for the common good exact a price that Israelis as individuals are willing to pay when social or security crises erupt. But in calmer situations the average Israeli seeks to express other values, such as competitiveness and success, as a respite from the heavy burden of solidarity. To balance out that burden, he allows himself the natural right to behave in a more individualistically instrumental way than his European or American colleagues, who are less often called upon to rally to solidarity. The following story sheds some light on the interactions between solidarity and rational emotions in Israel.
The summer of 2006 was unusually hot in Israel. For several very long weeks, a bitter military conflict raged between Israeli forces and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah managed to strike at Israeli civilian targets harder than they had been hit since 1948.
In the middle of that hard-fought war I received an e-mail from Doris, an acquaintance of mine, whose daughter Ruth had come for a summer visit to Israel just before the war began. I’ve known Doris Ericson and her husband Larry since 1990, when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. My wife and I often spent weekends with them and their daughter Ruth, who was ten years old at the time. Ruth was a true wonder child. She had mastered three languages and several musical instruments, and did not hesitate to correct any of us if we made the smallest mistake, whether that was misquoting the price of an item in the supermarket or misunderstanding the concept of a quantum bit of information in computer science. After we returned to Israel, we naturally saw the Ericsons less often. In 2006 we had not seen Ruth, who had by then turned twenty-seven, in nearly seventeen years.
On that unusual Friday, while a war was raging, Ruth was supposed to come to our place for dinner. At around 7 p.m. she called from the center of Jerusalem to ask me to explain to the driver of the taxi she was in how to get to our house, and to do so quickly because the battery on her mobile phone was nearly empty.
The trip from the center of Jerusalem to our house normally takes about twenty minutes. At 7:45, when Ruth still hadn’t arrived, I rang her telephone number to ask if everything was all right. There was no reply. As my level of concern for Ruth began rising, my wife Atalia tried to soothe my worries. “Of course she isn’t answering.” said Atalia, “Don’t forget that her phone battery is dead.” But by 8:15, when Ruth still hadn’t arrived, even Atalia could no longer hide her anxiety.
At 9 p.m. we couldn’t stand anymore: we decided to call the police. Instead of being told by the policeman on the other end of the line that I was being a nuisance by contacting the police for no good reason in the middle of a war (which is actually what I had hoped I would be told), I was extremely alarmed by what he said. “What you are reporting, Mr. Winter,” said the policeman, “sounds very serious. You should have called us earlier.” Within less than half an hour a police patrol car was at our house, with the police force already engaged in an effort to identify the exact location from which Ruth had last made contact with us by phone, in the hope of tracing where she might be.
“Mr. Winter,” asked a policeman, “what can you tell us about the taxi driver’s reaction to the route you suggested to him?”
“He simply said something like ‘No problem, I understand.’ ”
Many more questions followed: “Did he respond in the middle of your explanation or only when you had finished? Did he have any identifiable accent?”
When all attempts at locating Ruth using her mobile telephone came up empty, the police sent a patrol car to the area from which she had last contacted us. They asked us to supply a detailed description of Ruth’s physical appearance. We told them that we were unable to do so.
“What do you mean?” asked one of the policemen angrily. “Is there someone named Ruth who was supposed to visit you this evening or not?”
When Atalia and I tried to reconstruct what Ruth looked like as a ten-year-old girl, the policemen lost their patience. “Isn’t there anyone who knows Ruth well enough to give us a description of what she looks like today? What about her parents?”
As I mumbled that her parents certainly know what Ruth looks like, the sentence I was afraid I would hear followed: “Then get Ruth’s mother on the phone.”
The handful of minutes during which I spoke on the phone with Doris, who was at her home in Pittsburgh, were the most difficult I experienced that evening.
“Doris,” I said, “please listen—Ruth hasn’t shown up.”
A heart-stopping silence fell over our conversation. I tried to calm both of us. “Doris, it’s only been two or three hours since she was supposed to arrive. Maybe Ruth decided at the last moment that instead of a boring evening with friends of her parents she would rather take a taxi to a more interesting place. Maybe she is meeting a girlfriend or a boyfriend . . .”
“No, Eyal,” replied Doris. “She doesn’t know anyone there other than you and Atalia. I don’t know what to do. Larry is at a conference in California, and I am alone at home. You must help me.”
The conversation with Doris left me and Atalia feeling even more anxious than before. I decided to make one more attempt to contact Ruth’s mobile telephone before turning again to the policemen in my living room. To my surprise, this time I heard Ruth’s voice answering.
“Ruth, is it you? Where are you??”
“Eyal,” replied Ruth, “I’m having dinner at your house.”
“No, Ruth, where are you right now?”
“I’m at your house now,” insisted Ruth.
At that point the police interrupted: “Tell her we are sending a patrol car straight away. Just get her to tell us where she is.”
“I think she is confused,” I stammered.
“Of course she is confused!” barked a policeman. “She’s apparently been attacked. Try to get her to describe what she sees around her.”
I handed the phone to Atalia, who I felt would be better at this task, as she is a trained psychologist.
“Hi Ruth, this is Atalia. Tell me exactly what you see around you.”
“I see several people sitting around a long table. You’re in the kitchen now, right?”
“Yes, of course,” replied Atalia. “Could you please let me speak with one of the people at the table?”
“Sure, just a moment.”
Within seconds a deep male voice could be heard speaking into the phone. It turned out to be a neighbor from only a few houses away. An irresponsible taxi driver had brought Ruth to the wrong address. That, along with some distracted thinking on Ruth’s part and some over-the-top hospitality on the part of the neighbors (who had just moved into the neighborhood), had led to a comedy of errors that we did not in the least find amusing.
If my neighbors’ behavior seems strange to you, keep in mind that this happened in the middle of a war. Atalia and I, like many others, had invited people from the north of the country, which was being attacked by rockets, to come stay in our town far from the range of the rockets. Our neighbors had innocently assumed that the young woman who showed up at their doorstep was yet another refugee from the north seeking temporary respite from the war. When they opened the door of their house in such a welcoming manner, Ruth was convinced that she had found the home of her parent’s friends. She immediately slipped off her shoes, walked in with a broad smile and hugged every person standing there.
The others sitting at the table at my neighbor’s house thought there was something a bit strange in the behavior of this uninvited guest but made an effort to avoid embarrassing her or making her feel unwanted.
By this point Atalia understood that Ruth had mistakenly found her way to a nearby house. She excitedly ran out to bring Ruth to our house, not even stopping first to put on her shoes. When my neighbors’ eldest son saw Atalia running toward his house barefoot he shouted “Mom, there’s another crazy lady coming here!”
For several hours, Ruth found herself welcomed as the guest of a family she did not know, with neither her nor her hosts considering the possibility that a mistake had been made, because they did not share the same cultural norms regarding the behavior expected of guests and hosts. Ruth did not imagine that she had arrived at the wrong house, because in the cultural norm with which she was familiar (that of the United States) it is inconceivable for a complete stranger walking into a random house to be as warmly welcomed as Ruth was. In judging the situation using her cultural norms, she fell into the trap of ethnocentrism.
For Ruth’s hosts, a religious Israeli family, having a stranger as a guest for a Friday night meal is the most natural thing in the world, especially during a war in which many people had fled and were still fleeing from parts of the country threatened by rockets. They expected an individual under those circumstances to feel comfortable seeking a house and a meal. The warmth with which they greeted Ruth seemed self-evidently natural to them, and they strove to do everything to maintain her comfort level and avoid raising any subject that might cause her embarrassment. They too fell into a trap of ethnocentrism, albeit an ethnocentrism trap that was pleasant for those who fell into it (and rather unpleasant for some of us outside it).
In any event, after that evening I never again felt a need to apologize when Israelis appeared to be selfish and egoistical in laboratory experiments.
The story of Ruth’s disappearance provides us with yet another important lesson on selfishness and generosity: Why did my neighbors allow a complete stranger to invade the intimacy of their weekend dinner? Would they have acted in a similar manner in time of peace? Clearly the generosity they displayed had a lot to do with the existing state of war in Israel at the time.
The tension between solidarity and individualism that is so prominent in the Israeli society exists, though in a more moderate form, in every society. At times of crisis such as wars or natural disasters, people will crave solidarity and will despise competitiveness and selfishness. But as soon as the threat is gone, these feelings will be replaced by an increased appetite for individualism and self-interest. Bourbon Street during Hurricane Katrina and Wall Street during a stock market boom are two different planets in terms of the way we think about individualism and solidarity.
People seem to be less selfish and more generous to fellow group members when the group is exposed to an outside threat. We term this behavior “solidarity,” and it is crucial to the survival of societies.
Solidarity as a form of collective emotion is the topic of our next chapter.