Response to Jason Biggeman: "self love is insufficient"
I am not clear that Jason Biggeman (Productivity Shock) and I agree about what we disagree about!
I am advocating ideas I developed a number of years ago in my unpublished (as yet) ms on: "The Prehistory of the Deal", which looks at the social evolution of bargaining from the speciation of the "Brutes" (Hominids) from four to six million years ago and then from them to Homo Sapiens about 200,000 years ago. I intend to return to this project when I have finished my current book on Adam Smith for Palgrave’s ‘Great Thinkers’ series.
While altruism is a familiar theme (as correctly defined by you) in anthropology I have never been comfortable with the idea of altruism as a general component of human behaviour. This centres on human motivation, I agree, but in practice 'reciprocal altruism', as I observe it, more with sarcasm than as a definition casts doubt on the idea that so-called ‘altruistic’ actions are truly altruistic. They may be altruistic for saints, but there are precious few saints around and certainly not enough of them to populate a regime of benevolent donors (apart from the fact that all economic resources – anything that has excess demand at zero price – are scarce).
The dominant behaviour among humans is exchange, not ‘selfless’, nor selfish, actions, best described as ‘plunder’, and benevolence has restricted scope in a world of scarce resources. But neither is unmitigated self-interest dominant in exchange in practice because pure self interest also has restricted scope – it leads to deadlock in negotiation (which is the dominant behaviour in exchange). My special interest for thirty years has been in negotiation, observing, participating and thinking about the negotiation process.
In the Ultimatum game, and its derivatives, 99-1, the pure self interested choice of offer of Player A, is deadlock, or no deal; both get nothing. What some economists claim is ‘rational’, i.e., Player B ‘should’ (would?) accept this offer is contrary to experience, and not only in the Ultimatum Game, but also in the negotiation process. Add competing opening offers in Ultimatum and the self-interested behaviours of the Players change. The question sooner or later dawns on Player A (who initiates the first and only offer): ‘how much of the amount on the table am I will to give up to Player B to avoid gaining zero?’ Similarly, for Player B the question becomes; ‘How little of what’s on the table am I willing to accept the avoid getting zero?’ Humans are sentient beings.
Accepting the only offer of 99-1, under the rules of the game, is equivalent to a negotiator accepting the first offer, a possible but unlikely outcome in practice, and, though sometimes observed from the naiveté of real world Player Bs, or when Player A’s first offer on such occasions is well beyond the boundaries of Player B’s negotiating range, it is still a normative mistake on Player B’s part. ‘Always challenge first offers’ is well founded normative advice to negotiators in explicit exchange transactions. It is also the case that some people decline the offer of even a needed favour precisely to avoid being under an obligation to the donor for some other reason.
Look at the process involved in the real world when we do somebody a favour. Whatever the motive for doing such an act, and some people claim to be acting selflessly in their intentions, it is not the critical moment to make a judgement as an economist (I respectfully submit). It is not what motivates one to do the act initially but what happens next that defines the nature of the act. What happens in the complete or the interrupted exchange is decisive; field observers should continue watching.
So, Person A does Person B a favour (however defined and whatever its content). No explicit exchange takes place in that first step, nor need any implicit expectation be present, though socially implicit expectations are present.
Empirical test: ask subjects to complete the sentence (or its local language equivalent): ‘One good turn deserves ……….’.
If you completed the sentence as you read it, you make my point. By its nature it need not be formulated as an explicit expectation that the favour will be returned, though I have been challenged indignantly and forcefully, by some people when I assert these points thus far, who defend their pure motives for donating a favour of act of kindness and resent my ‘insult’.
Now, what happens subsequently when Person B has an opportunity to do person A favour, but for whatever reason Person B does not reciprocate in proportion to Person A’s original favour? I submit, from observation not rational deduction, that most of the people in the Person A group (those doing the initial favour) are likely to feel resentful, some hotly so. Not all of them, of course, though those who do not are likely to be a declining number of the set of Person As; some few will never feel resentful, let’s call them the ‘saintly set’. Most Person As are not in the saintly set. Therefore most of us cannot be classed as ‘altruistic’, as defined, once the favour can be but isn’t reciprocated.
Consequently, most of the ‘non-saintly set’ of Person As will not repeat subsequently any favours towards those Person Bs who populate the set of ‘non-reciprocators’. The non-saintly set of Person A types justify their resentment by reference to their implicit expectation of a favour being returned in proportion to favours given to them ‘freely’: 'It's only fair', 'What a mean person she is', ‘ the dirty rotten swine’, ‘ungrateful slob’, and so on.
By reference to research into chimpanzee behaviours (R. Dunbar, etc.,) it was observed that chimps groom those, for whom they have discretion about grooming, who have groomed them in the recent past and, crucially they do not discretionally groom those who have not returned the favour of grooming in the recent past. I suggest that this behaviour among chimps today was practised among the antecedent species of Hominids (if the common ancestor of chimps behaved a reciprocal exchangers, it is more than likely that the hominids did too) and by the time that the a evolutionary social process was underway these behaviours were firmly in the human repertoire of inter-personal skills (social change is a more rapid evolutionary process than biological natural selection). Once underway this process continued through the speciations that followed until Homo sapiens emerged as anatomically and mentally identical to modern Humans about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Whereas reciprocal exchange was initially implicit, with speech added to implicit exchange (favours) it added explicit exchange (negotiation) eventually, and both forms of exchange co-exist today in all human groups. Negotiation and reciprocation are data in modern human relationships and are among the universals common to the human species. I have not space, and you may not have the patience, for me to develop this argument in detail here.
But that is not all. Your argument is that self interest dominates the exchange transactions. As a first-cut working assumption I cannot quarrel with it (it was made explicitly by Adam Smith in both of his main works), but I qualify the assumption of pure self-interest with the observation that pure self-interest (i.e., selfishness) does not dominate explicit voluntary negotiation and implicit reciprocal favour exchanges. Self interest, as defined and in the sense that you use it, i.e., it dominates the exchange process, would and does lead to violence, plunder and coercion and not trade, as understood by Adam Smith and others, or as practised by human beings and the hominids since their speciation in their implicit, and latterly their explicit, exchange processes.
What evolved was not self-interest dominating human transactions – primitive Brutes and Chimps already knew about and practised selfishness – but the mediation of pure self interest in trillions of transactions, first within the band (humans did and do not live by bread alone and neither did or do they live alone) and then, following post-contact with other bands, among the bands. This evolved process of mediation of pure selfish self-interested behaviours produced, eventually, the conditional proposition, ‘If you give me some of what I want, then I shall give you some of what you want’. At this point, forever, humans behaviourally separated from animal ‘exchanges’. Violence (red in tooth and stone) did not end – probably never will – but the alternative, peaceful, voluntary exchange became practicable. With commerce (Smith’s fourth age) exchange through mediated self-interest became the dominant behaviour; through competition self-interest is mediated severely.
Smith hinted in “Wealth of Nations”, in the “Lectures on Jurisprudence” and in the “Early Drafts” that it was not pure self-interest, but self-interest modified by the learned behaviour that to serve ones own interests, one had to serve the interests of others. The issue of altruism in this context is not relevant, or even interesting.
The Ultimatum game and its derivatives or alternates stumble over naked self-interest only in the initial round. Self-interest is modified in repeated rounds of the Ultimatum game towards each party serving its own self-interest by serving the self-interest of the other party. Each party moves its offers and concepts of what is acceptable. (Try several rounds of Ultimatum empirically with players who are new to the game.) I side-step the issue of ‘fairness’ as this implies objective measures of distribution separate from the subjective judgements of the parties in the transaction.
In negotiation we call the means to achieving that acceptability criterion, ‘movement’ from an original demand or offer towards an outcome acceptable to both parties. In implicit exchange, the refusal to reciprocate provokes a non-repetition of the original favour unless the non-reciprocator, Person B not Person A, unilaterally offers a favour to Person A, which may initiate another attempt at implicit exchanges. Offering a favour to someone, whom you rejected to reciprocate with originally, is a way of saying ‘sorry’; not doing so creates an ‘enemy’ non-player for life.
People learn about exchanges processes, as they do about moral conduct and sentiments, as outlined by Adam Smith in “Moral Sentiments”.
You write: “By definition, exchange transactions are not unselfish giveaways, and therefore they are not instances of altruism. Therefore I do not agree that, to any significant extent, humans are motivated by a mixture of self-interest and altruism; rather, self-interested motivation dominates.”
My original intervention on your interpretation of Fehr’s assertions was not as well expressed as it should have been. I am no believer in pure altruism, nor am I a believer in pure self-interest (selfishness) in exchange transactions. Pure altruists are minor and uninteresting cases. Pure self interested players are also minor and uninteresting cases. Both are reproductively dead ends, even when they meet each other. Humans are motivated by a mixture of self-interest and exchange, mediated in the division of labour, the urge to ‘better themselves’, family and, in diminishing strength, friends and acquaintances, and weakest of all strangers, except when, as they are, strangers are the means to the betterment of self, family and friends in markets for goods and morals.
Where it gets really interesting is in the social processes for mediating self-interest, to which I urge Fehr and yourself to follow the transactions through, and do not stop at ‘self interest’ (what a range of human behaviours that encompasses), but complete the process right to its conclusion. Humans are motivated by a mix of motives – and ‘to [a] significant extent’. The evolution of the conditional proposition is far richer than mere ‘self interest. As Smith says, ‘self love is insufficient’. (Lectures in Jurisprudence, vi. 45, page 347). It is in the insufficiency of self-love that the lessons of the Ultimatum Game have interest. As a ‘proof’ against ‘altruism’ they have no interest (in the ‘so what?’ sense) at all.
I am advocating ideas I developed a number of years ago in my unpublished (as yet) ms on: "The Prehistory of the Deal", which looks at the social evolution of bargaining from the speciation of the "Brutes" (Hominids) from four to six million years ago and then from them to Homo Sapiens about 200,000 years ago. I intend to return to this project when I have finished my current book on Adam Smith for Palgrave’s ‘Great Thinkers’ series.
While altruism is a familiar theme (as correctly defined by you) in anthropology I have never been comfortable with the idea of altruism as a general component of human behaviour. This centres on human motivation, I agree, but in practice 'reciprocal altruism', as I observe it, more with sarcasm than as a definition casts doubt on the idea that so-called ‘altruistic’ actions are truly altruistic. They may be altruistic for saints, but there are precious few saints around and certainly not enough of them to populate a regime of benevolent donors (apart from the fact that all economic resources – anything that has excess demand at zero price – are scarce).
The dominant behaviour among humans is exchange, not ‘selfless’, nor selfish, actions, best described as ‘plunder’, and benevolence has restricted scope in a world of scarce resources. But neither is unmitigated self-interest dominant in exchange in practice because pure self interest also has restricted scope – it leads to deadlock in negotiation (which is the dominant behaviour in exchange). My special interest for thirty years has been in negotiation, observing, participating and thinking about the negotiation process.
In the Ultimatum game, and its derivatives, 99-1, the pure self interested choice of offer of Player A, is deadlock, or no deal; both get nothing. What some economists claim is ‘rational’, i.e., Player B ‘should’ (would?) accept this offer is contrary to experience, and not only in the Ultimatum Game, but also in the negotiation process. Add competing opening offers in Ultimatum and the self-interested behaviours of the Players change. The question sooner or later dawns on Player A (who initiates the first and only offer): ‘how much of the amount on the table am I will to give up to Player B to avoid gaining zero?’ Similarly, for Player B the question becomes; ‘How little of what’s on the table am I willing to accept the avoid getting zero?’ Humans are sentient beings.
Accepting the only offer of 99-1, under the rules of the game, is equivalent to a negotiator accepting the first offer, a possible but unlikely outcome in practice, and, though sometimes observed from the naiveté of real world Player Bs, or when Player A’s first offer on such occasions is well beyond the boundaries of Player B’s negotiating range, it is still a normative mistake on Player B’s part. ‘Always challenge first offers’ is well founded normative advice to negotiators in explicit exchange transactions. It is also the case that some people decline the offer of even a needed favour precisely to avoid being under an obligation to the donor for some other reason.
Look at the process involved in the real world when we do somebody a favour. Whatever the motive for doing such an act, and some people claim to be acting selflessly in their intentions, it is not the critical moment to make a judgement as an economist (I respectfully submit). It is not what motivates one to do the act initially but what happens next that defines the nature of the act. What happens in the complete or the interrupted exchange is decisive; field observers should continue watching.
So, Person A does Person B a favour (however defined and whatever its content). No explicit exchange takes place in that first step, nor need any implicit expectation be present, though socially implicit expectations are present.
Empirical test: ask subjects to complete the sentence (or its local language equivalent): ‘One good turn deserves ……….’.
If you completed the sentence as you read it, you make my point. By its nature it need not be formulated as an explicit expectation that the favour will be returned, though I have been challenged indignantly and forcefully, by some people when I assert these points thus far, who defend their pure motives for donating a favour of act of kindness and resent my ‘insult’.
Now, what happens subsequently when Person B has an opportunity to do person A favour, but for whatever reason Person B does not reciprocate in proportion to Person A’s original favour? I submit, from observation not rational deduction, that most of the people in the Person A group (those doing the initial favour) are likely to feel resentful, some hotly so. Not all of them, of course, though those who do not are likely to be a declining number of the set of Person As; some few will never feel resentful, let’s call them the ‘saintly set’. Most Person As are not in the saintly set. Therefore most of us cannot be classed as ‘altruistic’, as defined, once the favour can be but isn’t reciprocated.
Consequently, most of the ‘non-saintly set’ of Person As will not repeat subsequently any favours towards those Person Bs who populate the set of ‘non-reciprocators’. The non-saintly set of Person A types justify their resentment by reference to their implicit expectation of a favour being returned in proportion to favours given to them ‘freely’: 'It's only fair', 'What a mean person she is', ‘ the dirty rotten swine’, ‘ungrateful slob’, and so on.
By reference to research into chimpanzee behaviours (R. Dunbar, etc.,) it was observed that chimps groom those, for whom they have discretion about grooming, who have groomed them in the recent past and, crucially they do not discretionally groom those who have not returned the favour of grooming in the recent past. I suggest that this behaviour among chimps today was practised among the antecedent species of Hominids (if the common ancestor of chimps behaved a reciprocal exchangers, it is more than likely that the hominids did too) and by the time that the a evolutionary social process was underway these behaviours were firmly in the human repertoire of inter-personal skills (social change is a more rapid evolutionary process than biological natural selection). Once underway this process continued through the speciations that followed until Homo sapiens emerged as anatomically and mentally identical to modern Humans about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Whereas reciprocal exchange was initially implicit, with speech added to implicit exchange (favours) it added explicit exchange (negotiation) eventually, and both forms of exchange co-exist today in all human groups. Negotiation and reciprocation are data in modern human relationships and are among the universals common to the human species. I have not space, and you may not have the patience, for me to develop this argument in detail here.
But that is not all. Your argument is that self interest dominates the exchange transactions. As a first-cut working assumption I cannot quarrel with it (it was made explicitly by Adam Smith in both of his main works), but I qualify the assumption of pure self-interest with the observation that pure self-interest (i.e., selfishness) does not dominate explicit voluntary negotiation and implicit reciprocal favour exchanges. Self interest, as defined and in the sense that you use it, i.e., it dominates the exchange process, would and does lead to violence, plunder and coercion and not trade, as understood by Adam Smith and others, or as practised by human beings and the hominids since their speciation in their implicit, and latterly their explicit, exchange processes.
What evolved was not self-interest dominating human transactions – primitive Brutes and Chimps already knew about and practised selfishness – but the mediation of pure self interest in trillions of transactions, first within the band (humans did and do not live by bread alone and neither did or do they live alone) and then, following post-contact with other bands, among the bands. This evolved process of mediation of pure selfish self-interested behaviours produced, eventually, the conditional proposition, ‘If you give me some of what I want, then I shall give you some of what you want’. At this point, forever, humans behaviourally separated from animal ‘exchanges’. Violence (red in tooth and stone) did not end – probably never will – but the alternative, peaceful, voluntary exchange became practicable. With commerce (Smith’s fourth age) exchange through mediated self-interest became the dominant behaviour; through competition self-interest is mediated severely.
Smith hinted in “Wealth of Nations”, in the “Lectures on Jurisprudence” and in the “Early Drafts” that it was not pure self-interest, but self-interest modified by the learned behaviour that to serve ones own interests, one had to serve the interests of others. The issue of altruism in this context is not relevant, or even interesting.
The Ultimatum game and its derivatives or alternates stumble over naked self-interest only in the initial round. Self-interest is modified in repeated rounds of the Ultimatum game towards each party serving its own self-interest by serving the self-interest of the other party. Each party moves its offers and concepts of what is acceptable. (Try several rounds of Ultimatum empirically with players who are new to the game.) I side-step the issue of ‘fairness’ as this implies objective measures of distribution separate from the subjective judgements of the parties in the transaction.
In negotiation we call the means to achieving that acceptability criterion, ‘movement’ from an original demand or offer towards an outcome acceptable to both parties. In implicit exchange, the refusal to reciprocate provokes a non-repetition of the original favour unless the non-reciprocator, Person B not Person A, unilaterally offers a favour to Person A, which may initiate another attempt at implicit exchanges. Offering a favour to someone, whom you rejected to reciprocate with originally, is a way of saying ‘sorry’; not doing so creates an ‘enemy’ non-player for life.
People learn about exchanges processes, as they do about moral conduct and sentiments, as outlined by Adam Smith in “Moral Sentiments”.
You write: “By definition, exchange transactions are not unselfish giveaways, and therefore they are not instances of altruism. Therefore I do not agree that, to any significant extent, humans are motivated by a mixture of self-interest and altruism; rather, self-interested motivation dominates.”
My original intervention on your interpretation of Fehr’s assertions was not as well expressed as it should have been. I am no believer in pure altruism, nor am I a believer in pure self-interest (selfishness) in exchange transactions. Pure altruists are minor and uninteresting cases. Pure self interested players are also minor and uninteresting cases. Both are reproductively dead ends, even when they meet each other. Humans are motivated by a mixture of self-interest and exchange, mediated in the division of labour, the urge to ‘better themselves’, family and, in diminishing strength, friends and acquaintances, and weakest of all strangers, except when, as they are, strangers are the means to the betterment of self, family and friends in markets for goods and morals.
Where it gets really interesting is in the social processes for mediating self-interest, to which I urge Fehr and yourself to follow the transactions through, and do not stop at ‘self interest’ (what a range of human behaviours that encompasses), but complete the process right to its conclusion. Humans are motivated by a mix of motives – and ‘to [a] significant extent’. The evolution of the conditional proposition is far richer than mere ‘self interest. As Smith says, ‘self love is insufficient’. (Lectures in Jurisprudence, vi. 45, page 347). It is in the insufficiency of self-love that the lessons of the Ultimatum Game have interest. As a ‘proof’ against ‘altruism’ they have no interest (in the ‘so what?’ sense) at all.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home