People are programmed to avoid inequality, according to recent research.
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, the grandfather of modern economic theory, referred to individual self-interest as “the first principle of pure economics.” Until recently, economists routinely equated being rational with being selfish. The assumption was that, because humans are biological creatures, we’d been programmed by Darwinian evolution to put our own interests first—survival, after all, is a tough competition. As a result, even seemingly altruistic traits, such as giving money to charity or helping strangers in need, were seen as traits ultimately rooted in self-interest.
Richard Dawkins, for instance, has claimed that “we are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior.” Although Dawkins allows for morality in social life, it must be socially imposed on a fundamentally selfish agent. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” he advises, “because we are born selfish.” Such learned behaviors—for instance, children are taught to share at a young age—must struggle against our supposedly self-serving nature. As the evolutionary biologist Michael Ghiselin asserts, “What passes for cooperation [in nature] turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. . . Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed.”
Programmed to Care?
In recent years the tide has swung dramatically against such a bleak view of human nature, however. Researchers are increasingly coming to understand that people are also “programmed” to care about others. A recent contribution to this theme comes from neuroscientist Ernst Fehr at the University of Zurich and colleagues. In a study, the researchers explored a particular type of unselfishness known as inequality aversion. Suppose individual A has $10, and individual B has a lesser amount, say $5. We say individual A is inequality averse if he shares some of his cash with individual B, thus reducing the inequality between them. We say individual B is inequality averse if he is willing to sacrifice some part of his money, provided individual A’s endowment is reduced to an even greater degree, so that, once again, the inequality between the two is reduced.
Fehr and colleagues show that, in a sample of 229 children between the ages of three and eight years, younger subjects overwhelmingly conform to selfish (self-regarding) preferences. They don’t like to share and aren’t interest in reducing inequality. In contrast, the vast majority of the older subjects are inequality averse when put in either the advantageous (individual A) or inadvantageous (individual B) position.
So wait. Let me get this straight. We are programmed for survival, but we are programmed to care, at least until we get older and it is more important to survive than care about others?
Read more from Scientific America.
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Tags: Compassion, love, Science
You have those every once and a while my PT guy said. Oh well... - posted on 09/10/2010