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.
Economic Games
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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
We've discussed people's attitudes toward strangers a lot throughout this course.
And, it's an interesting topic, because there, there, there's a tension
between two class of facts about how we deal with strangers.
There's a positive and there's a negative.
So positively, we're often kind to strangers.
People give to charity, we leave tips
in restaurants, we'll help somebody in trouble.
But we're also often not
kind to strangers.
There's patterns of indifference to human suffering, which are kind of striking.
And so it becomes a very interesting question to ask,
what's our natural default response to somebody we don't know.
And, and, you know, to what extent is the division between people we know
and people we don't know, people who are close to us and people we are
far away?
To what extent is that a rigid
difference, that, that powerfully influences our moral thought?
And we, we've talked about this in different ways.
But one sort of field of inquiry that could
you give you some real insights comes from, behavioral economics.
And in particular, it comes from sort of so-called economic games, where
you bring people into a lab and you give them some sum of
money, and you see how they, what they do with it under certain circumstances.
And many people have argued that the responses in
these economic games tell us a lot about human nature.
And it tells a lot about our
generosity, our self-interest, our spite, our altruism.
So I want to talk about two, the two most
famous economic games and tell you in this lecture,
some of the main findings that have come out from the study of these games.
And in the next lecture, I'm going to
continue it, but a little but more critically.
So the first game is the Ultimatum Game.
And I want you to imagine yourself in the following situation.
You walk into a lab, and you are told you are
going to play a game and the game is explained to you.
So the game has two people: person A and
person B. These people are randomly selected.
So you're told we're going to flip a coin, and you're going
to be either the person A or you're going to be person B.
The way the game works is like this.
Person A gets some sum of money.
In this example, imagine it's $10, ten $1 bills.
You could then give Person B any amount you choose.
Anywhere from one
of the dollars, it has to be something, from
one of the dollars to all ten of the dollars.
And and you should know Person A and Person
B actually are not sitting next to each other.
They don't get to meet. They're in separate rooms.
They're, they're, they'll never meet again, it's all anonymous.
So, there's no way B could ever reward A
or retaliate against A this is a one-shot deal.
Now,
A is going to offer money to B, anywhere from $1 to $10.
Now B can either accept the money, then they both walk away B
with the money that B got, A with the money that's left over.
Or B could reject the money.
Now, if B rejects the money, nobody gets anything.
B doesn't get any money, A loses all the money.
Imagine you walk in the lab, and you're told, this is the game you're playing.
A coin is flipped, you're sitting in a cubicle, there's a computer
screen in front of you, and you're told, congratulations, you're player A.
Here's $10. How much do you want to offer to player B?
Now, there's a way you might reason.
You might reason, I could offer, I like money, you might say to yourself.
If $10
seems too paltry to you, imagine they were ten $100 bills.
We'll stick with $10 but, but ratchet it up
if that makes you, makes it more interesting to you.
You want to keep the money. Money is good.
How much should your offer B?
Well, you might conclude you should offer B, $1.
Because if B is a rational individual, B will recognize a dollar
is better than nothing, so they should keep the money.
No, you would have to be insane to reject a dollar, you're just throwing away money.
So, you should offer the minimum.
It turns out though, that people offer about half, about $5 out of the $10.
Why would they do this? Well, here's one answer.
You're person A and you're trying to imagine what it's
like to be person B and something occurs to you.
It occurs to you that B might not be entirely self-interested and rational.
Maybe B won't, doesn't want to accept an unfair distribution.
Something as paltry as $1.
Maybe B will expect you to give him or her about half,
and so if you give him or her less, they'll reject it.
And if you know that other person's going to
reject the small offer, you have to offer five.
If you just offer one, you'll walk home with nothing.
If you offer two, you'll walk home with nothing,
but if you offer $4 or $5, they'll accept it.
You get to to keep your money. They get to keep their money.
Now, it turns out the idea that people get
upset at being offered low amounts of money is correct.
And this is reflected in many ways.
There are FMRI neuro-imaging studies that find that the brain activation when
people get low offers is consistent with being upset, is consistent with spite.
There are facial expression studies finding that
when people get low-ball offers, their faces
contort into a look of contempt or disgust, the face on the far left there.
And finally, that's when people will tell you.
If you, in one study they had a situation where the receiver not only got to accept
or reject the money, but also got to send
a message to the person who proposed the money.
And when people got low offers they would send certain messages.
So one message was, should not have been greedy, oh well, you make nothing.
Now notice the person, B, B doesn't make anything either, B threw away money,
but had the satisfaction of making sure A didn't get any money either.
Dude, that's kind of greedy. We should have divided the money equally.
Thanks for nothing. And my favorite, you suck.
So people don't like getting low-ball offers.
And, in response when if, if you want to walk away with some money
and you're person A, you have to offer a significant amount of money.
And this is actually a really interesting fact about human interaction,
which is that in certain cases it's useful to
be irrational, or at least to be seen as irrational.
The problem is a rational person is easily exploited, because you know if you
do something bad to them, they will
always give a measured and proportionate response.
You see a rational person and they're eating dessert.
You take away their dessert. And they say,
why did you take away my dessert?
And you say well, I know you're not going to get in a big fight over this.
I know you're not going to get too upset.
That would be unreasonable.
So I'm going to take your dessert whenever I want to.
Its just a dessert, it won't bother you.
It isn't worth it for you, so I get to do whatever I
want to you, as long as your response doesn't get too, too violent.
But it won't be violent if I just steal your dessert, so I'll steal your dessert.
Imagine a different kind of person. You walk up to them,
you know, you reach for their dessert, and they say, if you steal my
dessert, I will kill you, then I'll kill your whole family, then I'll kill myself.
It's unreasonable.
But, you're not going to take that person's dessert.
There's an advantage, perversely, in being known
as a person who will behave irrationally.
Because the, the, the possibility of irrational
retaliation forces them to be nicer to you than they otherwise would.
And this is nowhere near as, nowhere clearer than the Ultimatum Game.
If you were playing with a rational computer, you'd
always give a dollar, because a dollar's been nothing.
They would take it.
They get nothing out of punishing you.
But because they're irrational, you have to give them more.
Now, I think the Ultimatum Game tells you a lot of interesting
things about strategies and social situations and about
how people reason about the minds of other people.
But it doesn't tell you anything about generosity or fairness.
Because the, the generous gifts in the Ultimatum Game may not
be generosity at all, it might just be, well I want to
take home some money and I know I might be dealing
with a spiteful person so, I have to offer a lot.
But there's another
game that, that avoids this problem. And it's incredibly simple.
It's called the Dictator Game.
And a Dictator Game is that A has
$10, A can give B any amount that they want,
from nothing to all of it, and that's it. It's not even a game at all.
It's a single choice, a single individual makes.
Now, if you're greedy, you just take the $10 and walk away.
But interestingly, people don't do that.
Even though there's no chance of retaliation, what you do is final.
Even though the person you're interacting with can't, will never know it's you,
can't reward you or punish you in the future people give about 20% to 30%,
about $2 to $3, and that's really interesting.
Why?
Why don't people just walk away?
Well, many economists, and then psychologists and
anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have taken these findings,
particularly the findings from the Dictator Game, as
suggesting that we're naturally generous, we're naturally egalitarian.
And so there's a lot of research that,
looking at how could this egalitarian attitude have evolved?
Why are we so naturally kind to strangers?
What benefit could this suppose?
And this is one way to interpret the results from these economic games.
In the next lecture though, I want to
present a very different, much more cynical view.
[MUSIC]
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