How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.
Criticisms of Economic Games
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En provenance du cours de Yale University
Moralities of Everyday Life
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Family, Friends, and Strangers
Our moral feelings are usually most powerful towards our kin (such as our parents and our children) and our friends and allies. We will discuss these special bonds, and then turn to the morality of racial and ethnic bias. Then we use the tools of behavioral economics to explore the controversial question of whether we are ever truly altruistic to strangers.
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Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
So, the story we were left with at the end of last lecture is
that his economic gains will reflect his natural kindness and a part of people.
He's natural.
Egalitarian motives, since we were chosen at random, it's just the flip of
a coin that I'm A and not B, I should share the wealth.
I should, I should sort of just pass around some of it to the next person.
Now, this is a very nice interpretation of the data,
but many people are a lot more cynical.
There's something which seems strange about this response.
If I'm walking down the street, And I find a, you know,
I don't know, 10, 20 dollar bills on the sidewalk, I don't immediately
look around for someone to hand half of it to, even though
it was just an accident I found it instead of the next person.
So why do people behave so generously in these
economic games?
Well, there's 2 sort of cynical, alternatives.
1, is that it's not so much that the people want
to be good, it's more that people want to look good.
So, in all of these experiments, people are typically
acting and then experimenting sort of writing down a recording.
What they're doing.
And it might be that when people are being
kind and generous, they're, they're doing so because they don't want
to look like a bad person in front of the experimenter.
Now some of these experiments are done anonymously, but even then
people have a good sense that what they're doing is being monitored.
And often even when they're told it's anonymous, it really isn't.
Their behavior is being monitored.
And they find it awkward to do something bad in front of an audience.
And we've seen this before.
When we discussed the
psychology of religion and its moral effects,
we talked about experiments showing that when
people are being observed, they're nicer than,
than when than when they're not observed.
So people are more likely to cheat when shown a computer screen like this.
Then a computer screen like that, which gives
them the impression that somebody is watching them.
There was this lovely study where, where psychologists looked at the
extent of what people would pay for the milk that they
would use and had two sorts of posters up, either flowers
or eyes, and found out people were much more likely to pay.
When there were eyes on the poster as opposed to flowers.
So we, we could see that maybe the observation, people behave nicely in
order to preserve your reputation, in order not to look like jerks.
One economist points out that, imagine doing the dictator game.
And now you're on national TV. Your parents are watching.
All your friends are watching.
And you're probably going to get 50% because you want
to show the world what a nice person you are.
So, plainly, reputation has some effect.
There's now experiments suggesting that reputation may have a big effect and I'll
tell you about 2 studies, which I like very much.
1 is by uh; Dana and his colleagues.
So Dana and his colleagues are saying very clever, they explain
to their subjects what a dictator game was, and then they gave then a choice.
Either, we'll give you 10 dollars and you'll
play a dictator game with somebody in the other
room, or we'll give you just $9 and you can just walk away and keep the $9.
And what they found was many of their subjects took the $9.
Try to think for a moment what you would do.
So there is certain sense in which taking the $9 is crazy.
Because suppose you are greedy.
Well, if you are really greedy and all you care about
is yourself, you should just take the $10 and walk away.
In the dictator game.
Why, why settle for a dollar less?
Suppose you're generous.
Well if you're generous you should certainly play the dictator game,
and give away some of the money to the other person.
So why would people take the $9 and leave?
Well, what Dana and colleagues suggest is They wanted
to get a lot of money out of the
situation but they didn't want to have to feel
pressured to give, and there's a nice analogy to this.
There's a beggar on the street, and he has a cup out
for money, and I could, and, and one option is
I could walk past him and give him some money.
And another option is, I could walk past them, and not give them some money.
But a 3rd option is, I could cross the street, so I don't have to walk past them.
I could cross the street so I'm not
confronted with the option of having to be kind.
And I think this is why sometimes people
take the $9.
Another study was done by List and his colleagues.
And this is a modified dictator game, so there's Person A and there's Person B.
And Person A is told okay you're going to get $10, here's $10 for you.
And the other person who's in an another room,
you're not going to see him is going to get $5.
And the question is, how much of your $10 do you want to give away?
Under no circumstances, people give about $2.
They start to give some small sum of money.
And that's, and, and, and [INAUDIBLE] look, look, people are being generous.
But then, they did a clever twist on this.
They had exactly the same scenario, but now they told
the person, okay you have $10, other person's $5 You could
give that other person as much money as you want,
or you can take as much money as you want from
the other person.
Now, if the giving is just motivated by
generosity, this other option shouldn't make any difference.
Because, you know, why would I ever want to take from this person?
But it does make a difference.
When given the option of taking, all of a sudden,
people start taking away a little bit from the other person.
So how do we think about this? Well, their interpretation goes like this.
Suppose you let the standard game, you get $10, another person $5.
You're told
to give as much as you want to the other person.
And what you think is you know, I want to walk away with as much money as possible.
But I don't want to look like an ass, so I'll give him some money.
In a second circumstance you have $10 you could either give, you could take.
You say, look I want to walk away with as much
money as possible and I don't want to look like an ass.
What an ass would do is take all of
his money. I am not going to do that.
I will just take a little of it.
There is no generosity here.
It's basically reputation management and the idea is that that
our behavior is not so much governed by a sense of
right and wrong, as a sense of wanting to appear
right or wrong in front of an imagined or real spectator.
So that's 1 sort of objection to
the standard interpretation of these economic games.
A 2nd one is that regardless of why people give in the dictator game, whether its
due to generosity or its due to reputation management, this may not be universal.
It may be cultural.
So, in a classic article published just, just a couple years ago by Joseph
Henrich and his colleagues, they talk about
what they describe as the weirdest people
in the world.
And weird is an acronym, meaning Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies.
And they point out most psychology research is done with weird people.
Roughly 96% of the subjects of psychology experiments are from western
educated, industrial rich democracies, in fact 68% of the subjects are from America.
Roughly 99% of the authors Of psychology experiments are from
weird societies, and about 3 quarters are from the United States.
But only 12% of modern humans come from weird societies.
So almost all of our edifice of psychology, both this, the people we study
and the people who do the studying, are from a very narrow subset Of humanity.
More than that, this narrow subset is unusual in certain
significant regards. So, where people differ in their
lifestyle than the way humans have lived, and
the conditions under which we've evolved Through almost all of human history.
For a vast majority of our evolutionary history, we've lived small
scale societies that have no schools, governments, hospitals, police, complex
divisions of labor, market's, militaries, former laws or mechanized transport.
These are all pointed out by Hen Ricadall in her article.
They point out that that, that children had no books.
And no TV, they had no internet.
They learn ,they didn't go away to go to school.
They learned through observation and imitation by
around age 10 they were expected to be able to gather there own food.
And routinly kill and butcher animals.
This isn't the life that weird people
live including me, is entirely different from that.
And a life that weird children live in, including my children and including
the children that I study in my lab is entirely different from that.
Hen Ricadall suggests that this difference might make a difference.
They suggest that
data we collect on weird societies
including data about moral intuitions, including
data about generosity, and economic gains may not reflect the natural human state.
But rather may reflect a very unusual sort of cultural
[UNKNOWN] and then they do studies that might support this.
So, if you look at United States' behavior in the dictator game, in 1 study people in
the United States give just under 50% of their resources.
They give a huge, just about half of their money, to a stranger.
But then you look at other societies and it
turns out you get a huge amount of variation.
And in fact the US case, which is, may be taken
as prototypical, or, or, or sort of average, isn't average at all.
It's extremely generous.
And when you look at, at small scale societies that
are less weird, you find considerably less generosity towards strangers.
Now this point, that societies that are not weird, societies
that where, where people live closer to the way in
which we, we existed for most of evolutionary history shows
up also in reports of, of, of ethnographers and anthropologists.
So Jared Diamond for instance talks about
the lifestyle of people in Papua New Guinea.
And he writes, to venture out of one's territory to meet other humans,
even if they lived only a few miles away, was equivalent to suicide.
And Margaret Mead writes,
most primitive tribes feel that if you run across one of these subhumans from a
rival group in the forest, the most appropriate
thing to do is bludgeon him to death.
Now I grant that we are different, I grant that
people in this society and people in, in non weird,
sorry in weird society more generally, do help strangers, do give
do give resources to strangers We interact with strangers regularly.
I, I will land in a strange airport, and I will
be alone and I will be surrounded by people I don't know.
And, and I will not, they will not attack me.
I don't believe they'll attack me, I do not hate them.
But what the data suggests is that this
kindness to strangers is neither robust nor universal.
It's fragile, and it's a cultural innovation,
deeply connected to concerns about reputation and
not something that comes naturally to us.
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