I have been arguing that neurodiverse people are like hunter-gatherers in many ways: hunter-gatherer have more ADHD genes (radar minds for detecting prey), most likely also pattern recognition that allows them to detect and track prey and forage for edible foods and they have a different social cognition, being more egalitarian and direct (“honest”) with fewer rules and certainly etiquette than farmer societies.
Most of the world is made up of mixed hunter-gatherer, farmer and pastoralists minds. However, pure cultures do exist, of course. Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes, 2013) cites cultural studies involving different moral dilemmas, among them the Ultimatum Game: you get money and share it with someone who can decide if you can keep the money or not depending on their level of satisfaction with their share. Which of the three moral tribes would you expect to share most? Hunter-gatherers are famous for their sharing/caring attitude and their praise of altruism, so that seems like a no-brainer. Indeed, many hunter-gatherers like the Aché even offered more than an already generous 50% share. However, there is an interesting twist to this story. In a version of the Ultimatum Game, called the Dictator Game (the giver has the option to keep all the money if he doesn't agree with the person he shares with), the results were as follows:
tribe | offer |
Orma (pastoralists) | 50% |
Tsimané (farmers) | 32% |
Hadza (hunter-gatherers) | 10% |
What happened to the hunter-gatherer generosity? Greene writes “As you might expect, the societies in which people are most cooperative are also the societies in which people are most willing to punish people who are not cooperative.” This cannot be the whole story, as hunter-gatherers are cooperative, after all. The higher the level of in-group sociality the higher potential generosity can go (a simple matter of the mathematics of sharing). High in-group generosity and hunter-gatherer altruism are, therefore, at the opposite ends of a "giving" spectrum. So, the level of reciprocity would be higher with increasing in-groupishness. Hunter-gatherers would also share with out-group members, but more so if they are really in desperate need. Generosity, on the other hand, can have a dark side to it, demanding loyalty and obedience to authority.
One aspect of Greene’s argument is perhaps “envy”. Hunter-gatherers might actually be less envious of their fellow kind than other moral tribes.
So, how would children with ASD play the Ultimatum and Dictator games?
Intriguingly, in the Ultimatum Game, children with ASD were 37% less likely to reciprocate fair offers and 22% less likely to reciprocate unfair offers.source
They were also three times more likely to accept unfair offers (say 20%).
This behaviour was interpreted as deficits in social and cognitive development by the researchers. However, it isn’t really much different from what we observed in the Hadza hunter-gatherers above. So, what if this is just their regular evolutionary programme? This hypothesis should be verifiable in experiments with real hunter-gatherer children.
This difference in social behaviour may partially explain two phenomena observed in children with ASD: higher risk of being bullied (failure to reciprocate could be one of the major reasons) and a higher risk of being abused. Children and teenagers with ASD often put much more effort and resources into a potential friendship than is reciprocated. A lot of potential problems could be avoided if parents, teachers and classmates are aware of such behaviour.
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