The "I'll See You in Hell" Syndrome
- From: "BretLudwig" <bratzirules@xxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 15:02:16 -0500
The "I'll See You in Hell" Syndrome
study in which college students in 16 cities around the world played a"Dennis Mangan points to a WSJ article on a new behavioral economics
positive sum game in which everybody benefited if nobody freeloaded.
Not surprisingly, players in all countries chose to give up some money to
punish freeloaders. The difference was in how the freeloaders reacted to
being punished. In prosperous countries, the cheaters tended to respond to
punishment by mending their ways. In the more uproarious countries,
however, the bad guys just got mad and hit back.
Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those
identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to
contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and
Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those
who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone's
benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand. ...
Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in
Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi
Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by
deducting points from other players -- and to give up a token themselves
to do it.
"They didn't believe they did anything wrong," said economist Herbert
Gintis at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful
freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took
out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to
blame.
Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively
lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured
by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically
assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries
with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to
cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties
of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the
researchers found.
"The question is why?" said Harvard political economist Richard
Zeckhauser.
This is not a big surprise. The Swiss, for example, have been playing
positive sum games among themselves for centuries -- If we all, no matter
what language we speak, get together and defend our country from invaders,
we can all live in peace and prosperity.
In contrast, lots of people around the world, like Jared Diamond's pal in
New Guinea who got 30 people killed in order to avenge his uncle's death,
seem to enjoy negative sum games -- what I call the "I'll See You in Hell"
Syndrome after what movie villains say when, finally thwarted by the good
guy, they start the self-destruct timer on their volcano lair.
Really, the only unexpected result here is Seoul. This may be related to a
strain of knuckleheadedness visible among the young in South Korea, who
engage in possibly the world's largest and certainly best organized riots.
The multitudinous South Korean riot police, dressed in Orc-like uniforms,
don't attempt to prevent riots like other countries' wussy riot police --
their job, instead, is to go out and do battle with the rioters. And a
good time is had by all."<<
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/ill-see-you-in-hell-syndrome.html
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