Herbert Gintis: The Flip Side of Altruism
Economist Herbert Gintis studies why people do the things they do using game theory and mathematical models. An emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts, Gintis has also taught at the Santa Fe Institute and Barnard College. The author of Game Theory Evolving and co-author of the forthcoming title, The Cooperative Species: Human Sociality and its Evolution, Gintis believes that most people are predisposed to cooperate and be altruistic, and they aren’t even aware of it. Altruistic tendencies have a nastier flip side as well, but that’s all part of what makes society work, according to Gintis.
How did you get interested in studying altruism?
I studied all of the behavioral sciences — biology, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and anthropology — and I thought that it was crazy that these fields could have completely different theories of how people behave. Not only different, they’re contradictory. We’re part of the Network of the Nature and Evolution Process. About 18 people work for it — economists, biologists, anthropologists, psychologists. We use the experimental game theory to see what people want to do, what their preferences are.
What have you found about human beings and their preferences?
Economists have a model of choice that’s called the rational actor model. It generally assumes that people are selfish. In fact, that’s a very important part of it. And one of the things we wanted to do is test whether or not that is the case. We found out that it is not the case. It’s a rather very interesting phenomenon: People tend to be predisposed to cooperate with others at a cost to themselves as long as others will also cooperate. And people are willing to punish others when they do not century 21 homes for rent in buford georgia cooperate.
The reason humans are so successful is normally attributed to the fact that they’re smart. The reason they’re smart is because humans operate "hospital advertising" in complex groups. The reason they can operate in complex groups is that they have strong reciprocity: Not only do they share, but they’re willing to punish non-sharers. If you look at the whole range of social species, you find that punishing is very important.
Take bees. You always think of the hive as the big social collective, everybody does what they’re supposed vending routes nj for sale to do. But that’s not true. Workers often try to lay eggs, even though only the queen is supposed to lay eggs. If workers lay eggs, there are other workers that run around, eat the eggs, then punish the workers that laid the eggs. Wherever you find cooperation, you’ll also find punishment. Think of your own body. Each cell has its own self-interest to multiply. Why don’t they go berserk? How do you get cells to cooperate? The answer is, you punish cells that don’t cooperate. As far as we know, there is no other vertebrate species that punishes. Humans are by far the most social vertebrate species and we argue that that’s why humans are so cooperative.
How do you define altruism? In your work, you speak of reciprocity. What is that?
An act is altruistic if it benefits another at a cost to yourself, where there is no possible mechanism whereby you could gain even in the long run somehow: Long term benefit to someone else with a long term cost to yourself. We call that altruism. By the way, it could be a long-term benefit to a group at a long-term cost to yourself. We want a definition of altruism that isn’t subjective
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