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Genes, Culture, and Preferences

  • Thematic Issue Article: Strategic Interaction
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Abstract

This paper explores the notion that economic preferences were shaped by the joint action of genetic and cultural evolution. We review the evidence that preferences are partly innate, the output of genetic forces, and partly plastic, the output of cultural forces. A model of how genes and culture might jointly shape preferences is sketched.

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Notes

  1. See Croson and Gneezy (2009) for evidence on the greater risk aversion of women.

  2. The bulk of the behavioral genetics literature attempts to decompose IQ variance into genetic and environmental influences. See, for instance, the reviews by Goldberger (1979), Devlin et al. (1997), and Plomin and Spinath (2004).

  3. See Behrman and Taubman (1989) and also Sacerdote (2011).

  4. Of course, the environment’s influence is not limited to information—i.e., the quality of food consumed, exposure to toxins, and so on, all may potentially affect phenotypes.

  5. This latter requirement can be problematic. It is reasonable if environment is measured by parents’ income. It will not hold if parents invest differentially in their children according to perceived innate abilities, for example. The assumption that siblings’ environments are perfectly shared is also questionable.

  6. See Table II on page 1013 of the paper for these results.

  7. For a perspective from molecular biology see Kuhnen and Chiao (2009). For a discussion within economics see Beauchamp et al. (2011).

  8. Robson (2001) considers the still more basic question: What is the evolutionary reason for utility functions in the first place? Robson (2001) is an early survey and prospectus of this theoretical literature and related empirical work outside economics. Robson and Samuelson (2011) is a more recent survey focusing on the evolutionary basis of preferences.

  9. See Curry (2001) for the interpretation of these preferences.

  10. See also Robson and Samuelson (2007).

  11. It is straightforward to allow the signal to be multiple draws from this combined distribution.

  12. This is unrealistic since it allows marginal fitness to be negative when x > s, as must be the case for any fixed x if s is small enough. Since s is normally distributed, this possibility always exists. However, if the mean of s is large and positive, this possibility will be very unlikely, and is ignored for the present expository purpose.

  13. Although the additive constant term is also affected by the signal, this irrelevant to choice, of course.

  14. The expected utility for these utility functions can be expressed in terms of the mean and the variance of the distribution. Consider a gamble over x given by the pdf p(x). Suppose the mean of this gamble is \(\bar{p}\) and the variance is v(p). It follows readily that

    $$ \int p(x)U(x)dx=-({\mu}_0-\bar{p})^2 -v(p) -{\sigma}^2-{\sigma}_0^2 $$

    and

    $$ \int p(x)V(x)dx=-({{\mu}_0^{\prime}}-\bar{p})^2 -v(p) -{\sigma}^2-{{\sigma}_0^{2^{\prime}}}. $$

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Acknowledgements

Robalino and Robson acknowledge financial support from the Human Evolutionary Studies Program at Simon Fraser University; Robson also acknowledges that of a Canada Research Chair.

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  1. Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

    Nikolaus Robalino & Arthur J. Robson

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  1. Nikolaus Robalino
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  2. Arthur J. Robson
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Correspondence to Arthur J. Robson.

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Robalino, N., Robson, A.J. Genes, Culture, and Preferences. Biol Theory 8, 151–157 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-013-0108-0

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