New Theory on Why We Are Nice to Strangers

According to new data, it would appear that people tend to be fair and trusting in strangers for reasons that are different than the initially-suspected ones. In previous studies, it has been proposed that individuals tend to trust people they've just met on account of the fact that they unconsciously transferred feelings of kinship to them. The previous work established that, as society grew, this habit evolved to the point it reached today. But the new work proposes that existing market places and the major religions play a much larger role in this phenomenon than they are credited for.

The paper also seems to suggest that deviant individuals – including thieves, pick-pockets and shoplifters – are not the norm, but the exception to the rule. For millions of years, our ancestors have lived in foraging groups made up of only a few individuals, most likely an extended family. It was therefore natural for everyone to know everyone, and contacts were easily established. With the emergence of the world's major religions, each of them promoting love for other people, these interactions were placed inside a new framework, which facilitated their development.

In other words, changes in the way societies were set up promoted a pro-social type of behavior, which eventually developed into our propensity for entertaining in conversations with strangers. “Measures of fairness toward anonymous others, in terms of motivations and beliefs, vary dramatically across human societies. And we can explain most of the variation between groups by the degree of market incorporation and the presence of a world religion,” says University of British Columbia (UBC) anthropologist Joseph Henrich, who was also the author of the new study. The work analyzed some 2,000 participants, pertaining to 15 different types of societies around the world.

“One of the things that might have occurred through cultural evolution to help build these larger groups, is the evolution of religious systems with supernatural agents that were in some sense police, concerned about those elements of behavior that would facilitate exchange and trade and harmonious groups, allowing groups to get larger and larger,” the author says. Details of the work appear in the March 19 issue of the respected publications Science, LiveScience reports.