The origins of fairness in economic experiments: how evolutionary behavioural economics makes a case for doux commerce

Behavioural economics works toward more realistic accounts of economic action, which includes efforts to endogenise the ‘social’. In its social strand, behavioural economics is specifically concerned with fair outcomes in interactive economic games, which are explained by reference to social preferences, norms and institutions. While these concepts also matter to scholars in political economy and socioeconomics, behavioural economists seek to go further in specifying their behavioural and evolutionary foundations. This article critically evaluates evolutionary research strategies in the social strand of behavioural economics, which aim to uncover the evolutionary origins of fairness in economic experiments. Representatives of this field offer new support for the classical idea of ‘doux commerce’, or the civilising function of markets, by suggesting that cooperation with strangers in economic exchange fundamentally shaped the course of human evolution. Their explanatory framework is gene-culture coevolution, which covers long timespans of human existence. However, the case for the virtuous effect of markets in human prehistory remains ambiguous: basic concepts, causal mechanisms, and timescales of analysis vary to an extent that it is possible to arrive at very different projections of ‘doux commerce’ into the past. With regard to the present, these fulfil a similar function in naturalising market moralities.