You know that thing where US Air Force brass like to say that it was mutually assured destruction (MAD) that kept the world safe after WWII?

I know such “ultimatum” gaming is wrong generally (pun not intended) because of simple history, yet now there is even more evidence it won’t work based on research in other fields.

Modern conflicts of highly-distributed multi-cultural conflicts have to answer to the Machiquenga results “shaking up psychology and economics”:

…a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

Spoiler alert: the results stood up. It’s a long read, well worth your time.