《未来简史》07：人大脑中的秩序 day16

Why did the Egyptian peasants and Prussian soldiers act so differently than we could have expected on the basis of the Ultimatum Game and the capuchin monkeys experiment?

为什么埃及农民和普鲁士士兵的表现会如此不同于我们的预期，而这预期是建立在最后通牒博弈模型和僧帽猴实验基础上的。

Because large numbers of people behave in a fundamentally different way than do small numbers.

What would scientists see if they conducted the Ultimatum Game experiment on two groups of 1 million people each, who had to share $ 100 billion.

They would probably have witnessed strange and fascinating dynamics. For example, since 1 million people cannot make decisions collectively, each group might sprout a small ruling elite. What if one elite offers the other $10 billion, keeping $90 billion? The leaders of the second group might well accept this unfair offer, siphon most of the $10 billion into their Swiss bank accounts, while preventing rebellion among their followers with a combination of sticks and carrots. The leadership might threaten to severely punish dissidents forthwith, while promising the meek and patient everlasting rewards in the afterlife. This is what happened in an ancient Egypt and eighteenth-century Prussia, and this is how things still work out in numerous countries around the world.

Such threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass-cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on a belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity. “If you sacrifice ten bulls to the sky god, the rain will come; if you honour your parents, you will go to heaven; and if you don’t believe what I am telling you － you’ll go to hell.” As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organize mass-cooperation networks. Sapiens often use visual marks such a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal “you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you”. Our chimpanzee cousins cannot invent and spread such stories, which is why they cannot cooperate in large numbers.