Often, when I write about moral instincts, people respond with assertions that we’re essentially selfish creatures and that nothing about morality is natural. There’s a name for this concept of the solely self serving human being, “Homo economicus.” The Neuroskeptic discusses a study that looked for them: Spotted at last: “Homo economicus”? – Neuroskeptic | DiscoverMagazine.com.
Are we selfish?
Economists like to say that, to a first approximation, we are. In other words, that we tend to seek to maximize our own rewards, in a more or less rational manner.
The trouble is that this theory (at least, a straightforward interpretation of it) doesn’t describe how people behave in many situations. For example, given a sum of money and asked to decide how to split it between themselves and an anonymous stranger, most people choose to give some of it away. This scenario is called the Dictator Game, and along with a handful of similar tasks, it’s a problem for the selfish theory.
The Neuroskeptic looks at the problems with the study, mostly in its over interpretive conclusions, but the point that stands out to me is that, yes, some portion of the population might have matched the description of homo economicus, but it was a pretty small minority.
Yamagishi et al tested 564 adults who lived in “a relatively wealthy Tokyo suburb”. The headline result was that 7% of the participants displayed “Homo economicus” behaviour both in the Dictator Game, and in the more complex Sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma. That is, 7% of people always chose to maximize their own expected payoff, regardless of how this disadvantaged anyone else.
In other words, 93% of the adults surveyed did not match the homo economicus concept. Of course, it was in a relatively wealthy population, so the result might be skewed. But even if the general population figure was half or double the findings here, it still shows the proportion of people who are purely self serving is a minority.
This fits if you think about it. Humans are social creatures. If we were all purely self serving, it would be hard to see how societies, or even small hunter-gatherer groups, could work. Sure, we can all rationalize ways that being good social citizens is in our own self interest, but that strategic calculus is much more Machiavellian than the average person’s thought processes. It’s much more likely that most of us have strong instincts to be, and expect others to be, good citizens.
None of this is to say that we have an instinct for each moral rule in our society. As I’ve written about before, the relationship is much more complicated than that. But the idea that we are all purely self serving creatures is false.
To make the point, in his book, ‘The Righteous Mind’, Jonathan Haidt asks if you knew that there would never be any repercussions, that no one would ever know, would you inflict pain to a small child for money? No doubt there are psychopaths who would, but the majority of us either couldn’t do it, or would find it extremely hard, no matter how much we might benefit from it.