164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2021

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don’t understand about human behavior, different academic disciplines seem to have developed completely incompatible models to try to explain it. And as today’s guest Herb Gintis complains, they don’t put nearly enough effort into talking to each other to try to reconcile their views. So that what he’s here to do. Using game theory and a model of rational behavior — with an expanded notion of “rationality” that includes social as well as personally selfish interests — he thinks that we can come to an understanding that includes ideas from biology, economics, psychology, and sociology, to more accurately account for how people actually behave.

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Herbert Gintis received his PhD in economics from Harvard University. After a long career as professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, he is currently a professor at Central European University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His book Schooling in Capitalist America, written with frequent collaborator Samuel Bowles, is considered a classic in educational reform. He has published books and papers on economics, game theory, sociology, evolution, and numerous other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Blindscape Podcast.
0:03.6	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:05.4	And today's episode is going to be one of the more ambitious mind-bending episodes that
0:10.2	we get here on Blindscape.
0:11.7	But not because we're doing some esoteric physics or mathematics subject.
0:16.2	We're thinking about human beings.
0:18.1	Today's guest is Herb Gintis, who originally became well known as an economist, but these
0:23.2	days probably better to classify him as a behavioral scientist.
0:27.2	Because really Herb's whole thing, the thing he really wants to get across is, there's
0:32.3	something called how human beings behave.
0:36.0	And we should study and develop theoretical models for that behavior in a rigorous, quantitative,
0:42.3	empirically based way.
0:44.3	And then whatever we learn about how human beings behave should inform economics, but also
0:50.4	psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so forth.
0:54.8	These different disciplines might care about different aspects of human behavior, but they
1:00.0	should ultimately tell compatible stories about human behavior, right?
1:05.8	To me, this is just pushing all my buttons because this is a very poetic, naturalist way
1:09.8	of looking at human beings.
1:11.5	There are different vocabulary for describing them, but they better be at the end of the
1:15.8	day consistent with each other in some deep sense.
1:19.3	So how do you do this?
1:20.8	Well, Herb has some ideas about how to do this, roughly speaking based on the idea that
	...

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