The Economics of Enough_ How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters - Diane Coyle [57]
Their delight is misplaced. For one thing, other experimental evidence indicates that humans behave selfishly in other contexts. In some experiments, economists have shown that markets operate exactly as conventional economic models based on rational self-interest would predict.3 For another thing, subtle changes in the design of experiments can change the outcomes dramatically, as economist John List has documented.4 List cautions against drawing hard and fast conclusions about human nature from the results available to us now: “A first lesson that I take from this body of research is that what we do not know dwarfs what we know.”5
Having admired this modesty in an economist, however, there is a good amount of experimental evidence from a wide range of contexts that people do have an innate sense of fairness. For example, psychologists have accumulated a body of research about the way our moral judgments are rooted in intuitions, some of which vary widely between cultures or at different times—think about how attitudes to smoking have changed in recent decades—but a handful which seem a constant part of how humans are constituted. Jonathan Haidt has identified five of these universal moral themes: avoidance of doing harm, due respect for authority, striving for cleanliness or purity, loyalty to group or community—and a sense of fairness.6
The last two of these have been specifically identified by evolutionary scientists as aspects of reciprocal altruism. This theory about the willingness to help others in the valid expectation of being helped by them in turn originated in 1971 with an article by biologist Robert Trivers entitled “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,”7 and was further elaborated in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his classic, The Selfish Gene.8 As Steven Pinker explains it, reciprocal altruism is not a calculating, selfish thought process but the outcome of a set of human emotions: “Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future.”9 Reciprocal altruism is the evolutionary basis for our sense of fairness. The sense of community, likewise, is a moral emotion of evolutionary origin, rather than a rational choice, although there may be many good objective reasons (or rationalizations) for our having it.
Fairness is consistent with the “selfish” gene: very often acting in a seemingly nonselfish way delivers better outcomes for an individual, because so much of human life is characterized by the scope for mutual benefit (or by non–zero sum games, as a game theorist would express it). A woolly mammoth is more easily brought down by a group than by a lone hunter, while individuals in a modern economy are richer when working cooperatively and engaging in trade.
The role of fairness, or reciprocal altruism, in economics was given a big boost by Robert Axelrod’s 1984 book, The Evolution of Cooperation. Axelrod translated the concept into the formalities of game theory and showed that in a tournament setting different strategies against each other, those involving being “fair” performed best, and best of all was the self-explanatory “tit for tat.” Axelrod showed that the key to this result was the probability that the players would meet each other again—the more frequent the interactions, the greater the likelihood of cooperation emerging as the best self-interested strategy.
Further support comes from the study of our close evolutionary relatives. Primatologist