Result of the Week: Siblings and Hegemony

In the “West,” while people usually enjoy bossing their cute little 65 year-old siblings around, they also tend to try and maintain some of the younglings’ dignity, pretending to give “advice” rather than orders. Here it seems to be different. A friend in Yogya, for example, finds it necessary to boss a (fully grown) younger sister around, refers to her as "dik" (pronounced de’, and short for "adik," younger sibling) and explains:
“Who else would tell her what to do?”

Granted, dik, is said with a great deal of affection and is considered very familiar (and is answered by "kak," short for "kakak," older sibling) but there’s something about it that just presses a button in me…

I would like to note two things here. First, a disclaimer: I have no personal feelings whatsoever on the matter of sibling ordering or respect for one’s juniors. Second, these findings are dedicated with great love to two kakak I know quite well, but with a very strong caveat: even in this sample, there are cultural differences between Javanese and Minangkabau, so extrapolate to other cultures at your own risk.

The main point of the experiments in Yogya and Padang was to compare behavior in the games (where people divided real money in different ways) between members of different ethnicities and religions, and across different treatment groups randomly exposed to visual cues for political identity (nationalism, Islam….) A side-benefit of the experiments, however, is that one can also compare behavior across many different characteristics of the subjects, whether political or sociological. One example is subjects' gender (as posted before,) and another is the number of kakak and adik they have [there’s existing evidence for example, that single children are less “trusting” in one set-up, although there’s debate as to whether it captures “trust” (gated).]

In a "quasi-Ultimatum" game we played, people divided a pie of 11,000 Rupiah between themselves and a partner. These partners separately chose a “Minimum Acceptable Offer” from a given partner, below which they rejected the transfer and both subjects got nothing. In a sense, these “MAOs” give an indication of “demands;” of how much money the partners are willing to forsake in name of fairness, pride, justice…. (and these demands may vary depending on who the other player is, of course.)

In other games we simply measured generosity in an unconditional Dictator “game,” where people can divide 11,000 Rp. between themselves and a partner with no apparent incentive to give anything.

It turns out that there were significant differences both in generosity and in MAOs (“demands”) depending on birth order, with big differences between men and women:

While men of different birth order behaved rather similarly in Dictator, “younger” women were significantly more generous then “older” ones (youngest sisters were about 600Rp. more generous then oldest ones.) On the other hand, younger sisters were also much more demanding then their older sisters (youngest sisters had MAOs almost 900Rp. higher than oldest sisters.)

As was the case with gender differences, men seem more prone to exhibit differences when the round is anonymous. When information on the players was withheld, younger brothers demanded much less than older ones. (Perhaps in anonymity there’s less face to save – less pride to defend - and pure greed can take over?)

Finally, the lowest levels of “social capital” were exhibited by single children. They were significantly less generous then others (more than 1,000Rp. less generous than youngest sisters, for example) but, at least for women, they also demanded less. At least on these dimensions, it looks like single children are an extreme case of oldest siblings (who were once single children, after all, before the sky fell on their heads.)

To sum:
Always choose a younger sibling as your “Dictator,” but don’t mess with their pride.

--
The non-reductionist study of heteronormal hegemony, from PhD comics.
(I actually heard someone say “heteronormal” the other day.)