For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about exploring the roots of generosity through the lens of need-based relationships among the Maasai.
Among the Maasai people of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, there is a special category of friendship known as osotua, from the word that means “umbilical cord.” Osotua relationships grow out of a sort of platonic courtship and, once formalized, bind people in mutual obligation to help one another in times of need. Osotua is what anthropologists call a “need-based” rather than “debt-based” system of transfer: one gives or receives help based on the relationship, not on the ability to eventually settle the debt.
Lee Cronk, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, began doing fieldwork among the Maasai in the 1980s. He had long been familiar with aspects of the osotua system, but wondered whether there was more to be learned about the origins and prevalence of *osotua-*style generosity and risk-pooling. After Cronk published a small study on osotua in 2007, he began an ongoing conversation with Athena Aktipis, a young psychologist with expertise on using agent-based simulations to test psychological theories. Out of those conversations, Cronk and Aktipis (who is now an assistant professor at Arizona State University) began to conceive of a larger project that would combine fieldwork, computational modeling, lab experiments, and public outreach to study human cooperation and generosity. In 2014 they found an enthusiastic funding partner with the John Templeton Foundation. “I’ve always prided myself on being able to do research on a shoestring, but if you are so lucky as to get a big grant like the one we got from Templeton, you can do so much more,” Cronk says. “To be able to be part of a team and build a team and share ideas every week was just a great experience.”