The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (9 page)

Our visit to the matrilineal society of the Khasi helped to answer these foundational questions. Let’s explore the exotic life of the Khasi. Put on your seatbelt, because you are in for an incredible ride.

Minott (the driver who picked us up at the airport after we landed in India, whom you met in our Introduction) was our initial guide into the matrilineal society of the Khasi people. With him, we crossed over into a bizarre world of reverse sexism. By our standards, of course, it seemed unfair that Minott could not own a house, even if he could have afforded one, and that his personal opportunities were stymied. At the same time, we got a fabulous window into what happens when women hold their culture’s economic purse strings.

When Minott first drove us from Guwahati airport into the city of Shillong, every square foot of the road was filled with people—women in colorful saris, dark-haired men in cotton shirts, half-naked beggars, children—all pushing and pulsing against one another in the sweltering heat. The next day, when Uri went to a local bank for the cash we needed for the experiments, the people behind him crowded over his shoulders as if they were trying to board a train. (Once again, he was a rich Westerner, parachuting into a foreign culture.) When he made the request to cash $60,000 worth of travelers’ checks, the cashier went to speak to his manager and, hours of negotiations and discussions later, Uri got a huge bag full of rupees and proceeded to count them out in front of everyone.

Fearing that the people pushing behind him would tear the bag right out of his hands, he turned and pushed his way through the crowd, then fled as fast as he could. (We now understood the exhilaration that the famous bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde must have felt after each heist.)

Minott drove us up impossible roads to our destination—a peaceful village in the midst of verdant hills and fecund fields. Though rich in natural amenities, the village was economically poor. We dropped our gear, including the bag holding all that money, in our unlocked, rented house. Then we set out to meet the villagers. Instead
of being greeted by suspicious, red-robed Masai warriors who stood squinting at us, we met warm, welcoming, smiling people.

We discovered that life is considerably better for Khasi women than it is for their Masai counterparts. The Khasi are one of the world’s few matrilineal societies; inheritance flows through mothers to the youngest daughter. When a woman marries, she doesn’t move into her husband’s home; rather, he moves into hers (and out of his mother’s). The mother’s house is therefore the center of the family, and the grandmother is the head of the household. Khasi women don’t do much of the farming, but as the holders of the economic power they wield a great deal of authority over men.

Over the following weeks, we conducted ball-throwing experiments identical to those we conducted in Tanzania.

On one side of the village school building, the Khasi men dutifully queued up, and the researchers wrote down their survey data, just as we had done in Tanzania. One young man named Kyrham, who chose not to compete, was dressed in a simple white shirt and jeans. He smiled gently as he took hold of the first tennis ball. He seemed a little tentative at first, and his first attempt missed the bucket by a couple of feet. On the next try, he threw a bit more strenuously, and the ball landed on the other side of the bucket. He was clearly disappointed, and bit his lip. On the third try, he managed to land the ball squarely inside the bucket.

On the other side of the building, a woman stepped up to the line. Her assertiveness impressed us. Shaihun didn’t hesitate to choose the competitive option. She pulled up her sleeves, grasped
a tennis ball, and squinted, ready for battle, at the plastic toy bucket ten feet in front of her. Confidently extending her bangled arm, she tossed the ball toward the target. She missed, but that didn’t lower her spirit. As the second ball landed inside the bucket, she shouted with joy. In fact, she sank the ball five times and in so doing won
plenty of money for a few minutes’ worth of games. She was totally, wonderfully competent, sure of herself, and in command. It was time for her competitors to move over.

The percentage of men and women who chose competition, per society, tells the culture story. In competitive games, Khasi women chose to compete not only more often than US and Masai women, but even more often than Masai warriors
.

We had landed in a world turned on its head, gender-wise. Our results, summarized on the previous page, showed that 54 percent of the Khasi women chose to compete, whereas only 39 percent of the Khasi men did. Khasi women were
more
likely to choose to compete than even the super-patriarchal Masai men. Generally speaking, the Khasi women behaved more like the Masai (or US) men.

The Khasi experiment sheds some insight—in this domain—into the long-standing debates about sex differences. Of course, we looked at the behavior of women in a society unlike most others in the world. But that was the point: to strip away, as much as possible, the cultural influences of a patriarchal society. In the case of the Khasi, the average woman chose to compete much more often than the average man. Or, put more simply, nature was not the only player in town. For the Khasi, nurture is king—or queen, as the case may be.

Our study suggests that given the right culture, women are as competitively inclined as men, and even more so in many situations. Competitiveness, then, is not only set by evolutionary forces that dictate that men are naturally more so inclined than women. The average woman will compete more than the average man if the right cultural incentives are in place.

Can Women Negotiate Effectively?

So how does this interest in competing affect Khasi women’s behavior in the marketplace, where strong economic incentives rule? To find out, we visited an open-air market in Shillong, where Khasi and non-Khasi people live side by side.

The Shillong open-air market—one of the largest in the world—is a lively affair. As you walk among the crowds, you take in the odor of rotting meat and blood; the fresh smell of tomatoes, onions, and peppers; the scent of flowers, straw hats, and cotton shirts. Cheap electronics and shoes flood the stalls.

To see how culture affects negotiation style, we gave Khasi and non-Khasi men and women money to buy two kilos of tomatoes in the market. Prices ranged between 20 and 40 rupees per kilo, depending on how well they haggled; our participants earned more if they negotiated a lower price. For every tomato-buying negotiation, we recorded the starting price, how long the bargaining lasted, and the ending price.

We discovered two important things. First, Khasi women, trained from birth to be assertive and self-confident, proved to be successful negotiators; our ball-tossing experiment had proven to be a good predictor of real life behavior in these markets. Our second finding was no less interesting. The market functioned very differently, depending on whether the pricing rules were set by women from the matrilineal tribe or not.

When the Khasi women entered a section of the market in which non-Khasi people set the price, men and women sold goods and haggled side by side, and the Khasi women proved themselves to be forces of nature. Shaihun was among them. She was a fantastic bargainer, reaching excellent prices for such items as tomatoes or cotton shirts for her sons. Interestingly, when Shaihun and her peers entered a section of the market in which
only
the Khasi set the price and
only
women bought and sold goods, we noticed that there was not much haggling. The shopping prices appeared, as it is in the West, to be more set than negotiated. It seemed that the surroundings and socialization were instrumental in dictating how people behaved.

The two observations are related. Women can be nurtured to react to incentives in similar ways as men and to negotiate just as well as men. But given the option, Khasi women set the incentives in their part of the market differently than men. By setting standard prices, they simply made the environment less competitive and aggressive, and they reacted to the social incentives that they themselves set.

Can Women Save Mankind from Itself?

Another lesson we learned from the Khasi is this: when women are in power, everyone seems to benefit.

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin published a paper called “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he described what happens when a public resource becomes depleted because too many people are taking advantage of it.
¹
In the article, he described a situation in medieval Europe in which herders shared a common parcel of land on which everyone was allowed to graze cattle. As long as herders didn’t allow too many cattle on the land at once, everything was fine. But if one greedy herder brought additional cows to graze, the damage to the pasture increased, eventually depleting the parcel so much that none of the cattle could graze at all. (Remember the discussion of negative externalities when splitting the bill?)

Think, for example, about coastal fishing rights. In many places, overfishing has so depleted stocks that the future of a number of fish species is in serious question. Given the high demand for fish, each fisherman has an incentive to fish as much as he can; but if everyone does the same, nothing will be left for future generations—at some point the fish population decreases so much that it doesn’t recover.

One conventional assumption about women is that they tend to care more about public goods, like fish stocks and grasslands, than men do. We set out to investigate this assumption with the Khasi, as well as in a neighboring village of Assamese, a patriarchal tribe, using a standard game from economics called the “public goods game” (so named because it emulates what happens when we contribute money to provide public goods for all, such as well-cared for national parks and clean air).

We gave each group the same set of instructions: “In this game, you can choose to invest in the community, or to invest in yourself.” We told some of the participants the following: “Every rupee you invest in yourself will yield you a return of one. Every rupee invested in the group exchange will yield a return of one-half for every member of the group, not just the person who invested it.”
²

Given what you know now about their society, you might guess that the Khasi people were more inclined to spend their rupees to invest in the group. And you would be correct. Khasi men and women invested more in the group than did their Assamese counterparts. Basically, our results found fewer selfish people, regardless of gender, among the Khasi. These results open up a question—would a society “ruled” by women be very different than the one we live in today?

What Can We Do?

The edgy television series
Mad Men
shows us how far gender relations have advanced in American society since the 1960s, when public discourse held that women were supposed to look and act like Marilyn Monroe, and men were supposed to look and act like Rat Pack predators. The series offers an important look at the way society dictated male and female behavior before anyone dreamed
of a women’s movement, black power, or gay liberation. People may not have been sure of who they were, but they knew who it wasn’t safe to be.