Somehow, I'm not convinced

Ronald Bailey looks at the implications of a recent study of economic motivations:

Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. A recent study by a team of researchers headed up by University of California-San Diego political scientist James Fowler suggests that we may all have Robin Hood tendencies. Experimental economists and psychologists from around the world have been watching how people play various economic games as a way to probe the bases of human cooperation. One of the more interesting discoveries is that in economic games some people - altruistic punishers - will take fairly big hits to their winnings in order to reduce the ill-gotten gains of cheaters. Games with altruistic punishers elicit more cooperative behavior among players. In addition, other researchers have found that players will happily spend some of their own winnings in gambling games in order to reduce the "undeserved" winnings of other players.

In re-analyzing some earlier studies, Fowler and his colleagues suggested "that egalitarian motives are more important than motives for punishing non-cooperative behaviour." In other words, people are really more interested in enforcing income equality than they are in punishing cheaters. To tease out motives, Fowler and his colleagues devised a game in which there was no possibility of reciprocity or cooperation. Their hypothesis was that people would spend some of their incomes to equalize the incomes of other players.

I don't dispute that a certain tendency towards egalitarian outcomes may well have been a survival trait in early human development, however I'm not as convinced that the findings (as summarized in the article, anyway) are as applicable as Fowler and team appear to think.

One thing that struck me about their study was that it was — as such studies commonly are — based on the observation of a group of college students. There's plenty of reasons for this being a frequently used group to study: they're generally available during the hours the study's data-collection would normally be easiest to accomplish, they're generally of the same age-cohort, and they're generally willing to be guinea pigs.

On the down-side of using college students as subjects: they're not as representative of the general population. Socially and politically, they're both more likely to be economically well-off and also more likely to be liberal in their views. A sample drawn from this kind of group will have stronger biases toward communitarian outcomes than a more representative sample.

Bailey summarizes:

Assuming that these research findings are valid, how did this innate drive toward enforcing income equality come about? It's hard to see how an inborn drive could arise in Pleistocene hunter gatherers such that people spend their scarce resources to reduce other people's resources promotes either individual or group survival. Or is enforcing equality really all that different an activity from punishing non-cooperating cheaters? Perhaps early in human evolution, large differences in income actually correlated with cheating and thus automatically merited punishment. Another puzzle is if humans are instinctively egalitarian, how did early hierarchical civilizations in which the incomes of priests and kings were significantly higher than those of peasants come about at all? Finally, finding that humans have an innate tendency toward enforcing a norm of income equality would explain the persistent attraction of communism, progressive tax rates, the demand for universal government-supplied health care, minimum wage laws and other such destructive modern leveling ideologies and policies.

Historically, have there been many examples of communitarian groups lasting much longer than the first contact with non-communitarian communities?

Update: Check the comments thread here for more thoughts on the study.