Flip Side of Altruism

Herbert Gintis: The Flip Side of Altruism
By Chhavi Sachdev

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 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 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.