Superfreakonomics – what is the evidence for human altruism?
We held two great events here yesterday. In the evening RSA Chairman, Luke Johnson, hosted a speech by Sir John Rose, CEO of Rolls-Royce, on the topic of creating a high value economy. The Great Room was also full to bursting at lunchtime for a conversation with Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner about their book ‘Superfreakonomics‘.
Having read the book it was obvious to me that among the most controversial issues was the authors’ critique of ‘evidence’ about inherent human altruism. Levitt and Dubnar were fascinated, as it turned out this point had hardly been raised with them amidst all the arguments they had had about issues like climate change and prostitution. Nevertheless they set about making their case with great gusto.
You need to read Chapter 3 of the book to get the whole argument but in essence, and relying heavily on the work of economist John List, the two Stev(ph)ens refute often cited evidence from the ultimatum and dictator games which purports to show that people do not simply maximise gains but instead put a price on an innate sense of fairness. This may work in the artificial setting of the research project where students want to show how great they are but the evidence disappears when you construct a similar experiment in the real world.
What is more, we are only as fair as we think we have to be to avoid looking mean. So when people are asked to divide a $10 gift between them and an anonymous other they might choose to give away $3 or $4. But if their options include being able to take money off the other person (so the range of options are from giving away the whole $10 to keeping the $10 and taking $5 dollars off the stranger) the subjects adjust their offer to zero. In other words if simply not stealing is made to feel like it is a benign choice, people use that to legitimise keeping 100% of their windfall gain.
For me the interesting question is what does this more traditional self interested account of what drives us mean for our policy inclinations. At the beginning of my recent Prospect piece I wrote:
“As a schoolboy socialist in a 1970s grammar school, the first political arguments I had were about human nature. My idea of the good society rested on a view of people as collaborative and benign, qualities hidden by the depredations of ‘the system’. Working-class Tory mates mocked my naivety. To them we were self interested. Some succeeded by their efforts, others failed or cheated and would change only if incentivised or compelled “.
But it turns out the link between our view of man’s innate characteristics and our view of what government should and should not do are not as simple as this. Even if we think human beings are, in their interactions with strangers, overwhelmingly self interested this doesn’t mean we should be champions of laissez faire economics and a minimal state. The reverse could be true.
If we think pro-social behaviour is vital to the well-being of society but that people only behave in this way when incentivised, we might think it is more important to attend to the fabric of society (which generates the social norms that incentivise pro-sociality) and to how the state can encourage people to do the right thing.
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10 Comments on Superfreakonomics – what is the evidence for human altruism?
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carl allen on
Wed, 11th Nov 2009 12:06 pm
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matthewtaylor on
Tue, 17th Nov 2009 11:56 am
Altruism delivered has to be viewed in a number of frames … Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, placing the actual act of altruism in what the individual perceives as his findings from analytical frameworks such as TOWS and PESTILENCE and of course the mood one is in at the time.
It is like or unlike the quote “Only cowards can be brave”.
So barring altruism as an act of love, are altruistic acts a sign of confidence and power in oneself to afford or regain (in some form) what one gives away?
My comment would be that altruism is perhaps not a human quality or virtue since most start off the discussion with that assumption.
By way of note, technological solutions to environmental problems are inevitably global in effect unless we pass the “someone’s gain is another’s loss” dilemma i.e. the state losing will go to war.
I think “attending to the fabric of society” is a pretty fair description of what most of the great teachers I have known and worked with believe they are doing.
It is the ones who believe their job is to actually determine the pattern and the colour, who children and parents need to worry about, and in the last decade or so they have far outweighed the former.
Matthew,
A fascinating event, and great to see Levitt and Dubner put through their paces by the RSA crowd. The discussion was indicative of the current soul searching amongst economists in the wake of the banking crisis but did actually go some way to suggesting a way forward using some of the arguments that you describe.
I left wracking my brains for an altruistic act that might truly test their theories. Perhaps seeking to understand why anyone would invest in a professional football club would be a suitable conundrum for their next book?
Jake.
Have to confess I was rather hoping for some heckling around their widely-reported silliness over climate change and geoengineering, but the altruism discussion we got into was also interesting. What became clear was that the experiments they discussed didn’t really test altruism at all, but (as you say) the effect that people’s current environment has on their behaviour. It reminded me of a great quote from Buckminster Fuller, as reported in the New Yorker last year:
Fuller was also deeply pessimistic about people’s capacity for change, which was why, he said, he had become an inventor in the first place. “I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too difficult,” he told an interviewer for this magazine in 1966. “What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.”
Totally agree that the design of the fabric of society should be an essential focus for us.
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert/?printable=true]
Context is everything.
[...] argument And I don’t believe free v. paywall is quite as binary as this type of debate makes out. Superfreakonomics – what is the evidence for human altruism? : Matthew Taylor’s blog What is more, we are only as fair as we think we have to be to avoid looking mean. So when people [...]
From a neuroscience perspective, altruism is a natural consequence of the way in which decision-making systems operate. This is because of the way that we learn about our environment, and how the brain has adapted to social from non-social environments. So we would ask what is the evidence that human altruism does not exist?
Ben
http://frontiersin.org/behavioralneuroscience/paper/10.3389/neuro.08/023.2009/
The authors don’t deny altruism because of some evidence they happen to have found – they actively construct the evidence that matches a pre-existing commitment to a more general Individualism.
I entirely agree with your perspective on this Matthew – having a particular view of human nature doesn’t inevitably lead to this or that policy position, as many conservatives seem to think, and which the left tends to assume too. Policy debates often revolve around the idea that people are ‘naturally’ such-and-such, and the key task of government is just to get out of the way. It’s worth focusing on this ‘getting out of the way’ as a contested motivation for policy reform. Ideas like ‘altruism’ and ‘self-interest’ are generalising constructions imposed on human behavour. As such they are ‘essentially contested concepts’ . Their definitions can be subjected to the typology of cultural theory. In other words, I think it might be helpful to identify four competing constructions of human nature, not merely one, and therefore, four competing understandings of altruism. Armed with a view of human nature, Individualism does away with ‘red tape’, Egalitarianism does away with ‘faceless bureaucracy’, Hierarchy protects us from an ‘unregulated free-for-all’, and Fatalism removes rewards for anything other than luck.
The point of Individualist arguments against altruism is not to promote policy realism in the face of unchangable human self-interest. It is to steer policy into making us more and more self-interested. It’s activist. It starts by claiming human nature can’t be changed and ends by changing it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Policy-makers can arm themselves against this by learning about Cultural Theory. A good starting point is Christopher Hood’s The Art of the State (and the Fourcultures blog, of course…)
Thanks Ben. Have you read the chapter in the book? My view is that altruism is a human potential but that it requires certain social circumstances for that potential to be realised.
Hi four
Good to hear from you again. My CT take on altruism is that the four paradigms of CT boil down to four options, ‘choosing’ between which is the core experience of free will): ‘I’ll do what I want (individualism), I’ll do what the group does (egalitarianism), I’ll do what I’m told (hierarchism), it doesn’t matter what I do (fatalism). Altruism is usually associated with ‘I’ll do what the group does’ or I’ll do what I’m told but it can also be the outcome of I’ll do what I want (what I think is right) against the group. This is one way of seeing how altruism is socially constructed.
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