Evolution and Homo economicus?

Peter E. Earl** posts on Evolution and homo economicus HERE

“Why evolution wouldn’t favour Homo economicus”

Economists traditionally have assumed that all decisions are taken by weighing up costs and benefits of alternative courses of action. In reality, people seem to make their choices in at least three ways, and which way they use depends on the kind of context in which they are choosing. They can choose in a programmed manner; they can exercise free will after thinking carefully about the potential consequences of choosing one action rather than another; and they can simply delegate their choices to others and go with the social flow without really considering alternatives or where what they are doing might lead.

There seem to be good evolutionary reasons why humans have ended up with more than one way of choosing.

By being able to deliberate rather than merely follow existing decision rules, humans have been able to come up with innovations that enable them to thrive and reproduce, adapting to new environments as they do so.

But the capacity to deliberate is also potentially disastrous if a person can become immersed in a problem that cannot be solved rapidly. While attention is concentrated on one problem, the person may be overwhelmed by unnoticed external or internal threats. It is therefore vital that people have programmes that will kick in — as unmet basic needs do — to over-ride deep thought and ensure they make choices swiftly enough to avoid disaster.

Such choices may not involve consideration of alternatives — either in detail, or even, at all — but merely the application of a very simple rule. Prejudices and check-lists may enable people to make choices swiftly rather than become ending up paralysed as they try to consider the pros and cons of alternative possibilities. In a social setting, acceptance of suggestions from others enables the group to make something happen in the limited time available, so it is no wonder that those whose deliberative tendencies threaten to cause their peers to ‘lose the moment’ get labelled as ‘party-poopers’.

The capacity of humans to engage in deliberation is potentially disastrous for their reproductive success. Others species reproduce by following their instincts, in other words, by operating in a programmed manner. Humans are in a position to reflect on the costs and benefits of engaging in sexual activity, so their free will potentially can overcome any primitive programmed sexual urges. Cool reflection could lead to decisions to abstain: birth is dangerous for women, and the short-run burden of having children may vastly outweigh their long-run potential to provide support for elderly parents.

For humans to populate the planet as successfully as they have done, they needed to evolve something that would get in the way of such a view of sex and reproduction. That ‘something’ seems to have been the almost uniquely human ability to experience sexual pleasure. This had to be of an intense but fleeting kind that could not be stored in the memory and replayed in the imagination but was only available by repeating the sexual act.

Intelligence and the ability to experience intense sexual pleasure are, in evolutionary terms, a winning combination for the human race. The former makes it possible to cope with the Malthusian pressures that follow from the latter frequently overwhelming cool logic. Evolutionary fitness is also helped by inherited dispositions to find children cutely alluring while, in terms of social evolution, we should not be surprised that the societies that thrived in primitive times were patriarchal ones. The risks of childbirth would give women greater pause for thought than men about whether to allow sexual urges to be turned into action.

An evolutionary perspective on choice does not merely point towards a plurality of ways of choosing and to why humans are equated to enjoy sex rather than viewing it as at best a ridiculous activity and at worst as potentially disastrous in its consequences. An evolutionary perspective also provides reasons for doubting that humans would end up having the kinds of preference orderings that economists commonly assume. Being willing always to make tradeoffs is not conducive to survive if one’s body has a set of basic physiological needs that are hierarchically ordered. Moreover, when people are in a position to meet their basic needs, being unwilling to consider many kinds of goods (as in’I don’t like …’) gives them identities that facilitate social and economic coordination as well as reducing the choice problem to manageable proportions.”

**Peter E. Earl is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His Cambridge PhD was on behavioural economics but was completed long before it became fashionable to mix economics with psychology, and he coedited the Journal of Economics from 2000-2004. His research focuses mainly on how people and organisations try to cope with problems of information and knowledge. He has just finished co-authoring a book about the work of GLS Shackle and is currently engaged in a major project on how Australian consumers choose their mobile phone connection services. He is the author of the paper ‘The robot, the party animal and the philosopher: an evolutionary perspective on deliberation and preference’ in the Cambridge Journal of Economics.

Comment

Interesting approach but it seems to downplay the roles of experience.  There is nothing like observed or told about close-run behavioural incidents that threatened disaster and are stored in an expanded capacity for memory.

Among the “very simple rule[s]” humans learn are basic habits such as avoiding wandering alone in thick-bush or high grass conditions or today carelessly crossing a busy road, without thinking about or observing what might be loitering nearby or likely to happen. 

Better to stay in groups of observant relatives, preferably with heavy clubs and spear-like projectiles, and using vocal chords of learned and easily recognisable warning calls (near relatives like apes have developed such calls), or listening to advice from the experience of others and from observation, and of course, fear.

To engage in prolonged deliberation “is potentially disastrous for their reproductive success”, but so is a reckless inability to deliberate about risks.  Moreover, the change in sexual access from that experienced by our near relatives, the chimpanzees, played a significant role.  Female humans changed their physiological reproductive access from a few days only (Estrus) to daily availability, except for a few days per month (periods), which reduced the near monopoly of females by Alpha males only who were strong enough to beat off rivals, and made way for wider male access.  This widened the available gene pool on  a regular basis, other than from brute strength and dimorphism.

It is not just “an evolutionary perspective [that] also provides reasons for doubting that humans would end up having the kinds of preference orderings that economists commonly assume.”  The idea of “preference orderings” is suspect – try asking random people in the street about their “preference orderings”, especially those that were made up by modern economists in recent decades, rather than observed for millennia, also known as history. The “X, Y, Z” rankings than give potentially contradictory paralytic answers suggests at least in university classrooms that they are common, so relying on such rankings for life and death (or sex) choices are unlikely to be an evolutionary stable survival code and, not surprisingly, “is not conducive to survive if one’s body has a set of basic physiological needs that are hierarchically ordered.”

Humans in the forest in small groups, separated by vast distances, were many millennia away from “when people [were] in a position to meet their basic needs” in potentially dangerous environments where, for example, taking a wrong direction (travelling north instead of south, say) towards floods, volcanic fires or desertification events, that could wipe out some bands and its learned memories in what became an unforeseen tragedy.

That the human speciation survived is a remarkable event – DNA science suggests the human species population dropped remarkably at one, perhaps more than one, point in time, before it recovered and expanded.  Other pre-human speciations simply passed quietly from the scene or were absorbed into the human DNA lineage (Neanderthals, for instance, which now are just a trace sequence, plus some bones).

Homo economicus was and remains a late 19^th century fictional hypothesis, and not a part of the actual human behavioural history, which behaviour is far more messy than the Homo economicus and rational choice theory credits, and therefore not really  part of economic explanations of how real world humans lived and live in.

Still, its good to learn that Professor Peter Earl is one modern economist who thinks beyond the box.  More please.