intrust

A group of Irish are drinking in a pub. The following shibboleths are heard:

What are you having?

This round is on me

Let me get this one

The pubgoers are engaging in a system of reciprocity – what sociologists would call a gift culture. Amongst locals the ritual of rounds is sacrosanct. In the long run – say after a year or so, the outlay of each drinker will be roughly the equivalent of each paying for his or her own drinks – never anyone else’s, as is the norm in Sweden.

One can imagine a system where the publican keeps track of a groups consumption and settles the bill at the end of the evening, or once a week – dividing up the costs equally among participants. This might be a fairer system and avoid the eventual problem of freeloaders.

Here is why that is not a good idea. Though each pubgoer does have a rough idea of the general lay of expenditures, they are quite capable of forgetting the score in the short term. Each provider of a round can then experience the feeling of being genuinely generous when there turn comes and each beneficiary of a pint offered can experience the pleasure of receiving a genuinely generous gift. The pubgoers, in mentally putting aside their scorecards, if only temporarily (long haul freeloaders will be noticed and eventually ostracized from the group) are able to add an extra measure of pleasure to their gettogethers If they all paid for their drinks this would not happen.

I assume that as pubgoers, the ability to push calculation of facts and figures into the back rooms of our minds when they threaten to interfere with our pleasure, is related to a gamblers splotchy reckoning of her wins and loses, or a soldiers willingness to participate in the first wave of attack on the enemy in the face of hopeless odds.

A systems architect would be hard pressed to make improvements in the system of beer buying rounds. Some things just can’t be rationalized or technified without a depletion in the emotional or psychological well being derived in carrying them out. Much of the social capital cited by Putnam is rooted in face to face encounters; people getting together and doing things, where often the former is more important than the latter. For Putnam even television is a detriment to Social capital.

I know of no computer simulation of rounds at the pub, and I assume that from an evolutionary point of view it would be quite boring, since emotional gratification as a rewarding factor would tend to constrain evolutionary change.

Though Internet communities also afford users emotional satisfaction, it is not easy to imagine them as long run alternatives to their face to face cousins. As to whether the promotion of trust has an edge in either is debatable.

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 00:23