Apologies for the light blogging. I fly to South Africa next week and I have a number of deadlines before then (applications for conferences, grants, etc), as well as several for when I arrive in Cape Town: exam questions due for external moderator, tutorials must go up on the web, must finish and upload lecture notes, presenting a seminar a few days after I arrive... I have several half-written research posts that I hope to complete soon. So, apologies, but more...

When you come across a line like this in a paper, you can't help but laugh, "We now discuss and explain the cumulative number of sheep played in all rounds of the game." Yes, subjects played sheep. You may wonder how. I shall attempt to explain.In three papers based on work in South Africa and Namibia, Bjørn Vollan and, in one paper, his co-author Bernd Hayo investigate several different experiments with the Nama people. They ran trust games, trust games with third...

Are we Africans different to the rest of the world in our giving, punishing and trusting behaviour? Three remarkable economic anthropology studies try to examine this kind of question with several ethnic groups in four countries: the Pimbwe, Sukuma and Kahama in Tanzania, the Maasai of Kenya and the Ju/'hoan Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana. I can't to do any of the papers justice with my short comments, but I thought you might find them interesting nevertheless.The...

Schadenfreude, taking pleasure in someone else's pain or misfortune, seems to appear a normal thing to most people. It occurs in literature, comedy, our every day lives. But what do Economics and Social Psychology have to say about it? We know from previous research by Simon Gaechter, Benedikt Herrmann and several others that people display 'anti-social preferences' - they punish people who contribute more than they do to a public good. Now, a recent experimental...