To an economist who believes that human beings are rational agents always seeking to act in their own self-interest, the responder in an ultimatum bargaining game ought to accept any offer made by the proposer, however derisory (one percent is better than nothing). To the rest of us, who have a sense of fairness, who know that self-interest does not rule our lives down to the last penny, who suspect that impassioned actions might sometimes actually be a very good thing and who would reject an insulting offer out of hand - how else can we explain our behaviour? In this marvellous book, Robert H. Frank flips the widely held belief that our passions are always something we would do better to control, and shows just how our emotions can sometimes modify rational behaviour in a good way. His claim "is that passions often serve our interests very well indeed" and he argues persuasively that the roots of altruistic behaviour are emotional rather than cognitive.
Throughout, Frank uses "rational" to mean "self-interested" when describing our behaviour. For example, it is irrational to get angry over a minor theft and lose a day's pay to see justice done, since in all likelihood the cost of recovering the property and punishing the thief will be out of all proportion to the value of the item stolen. However, if the thief suspects that you're the sort of person who is predisposed to respond irrationally and emotionally and is not guided solely by material self-interest, then he is more likely to leave you alone.
For most of us, our commitment to justice will probably not be tested too frequently. More likely to get an airing will be "strong emotional commitments to norms of fairness" (which are why purely selfish people do badly when striking a bargain) and we're all familiar with the importance of trustworthiness in the realm of personal relationships ("where egoists fare poorly"). Frank's "claim is not that self-interest is an unimportant human motive, but that material forces allow room, apparently a great deal of room, for more noble motives as well".
Commitment is a key word throughout the book. Commitment problems arise "when it is in a person's interest to make a binding commitment to behave in a way that will later seem contrary to self-interest". Consider the example of two people who go into business together. Opportunities will arise for each to cheat the other and escape detection (the rational course of action), and yet the venture would be more successful if neither cheated. How do they make a binding commitment and so solve the commitment problem? What is needed are incentives to keep promises or "commitment devices" and Frank claims that specific emotions such as guilt, anger, envy and even love are better placed than rational calculation to fulfil this role. Our feelings "commit" us to act against our narrow interests.
The commitment model is shorthand for the notion that seemingly irrational behaviour "is sometimes explained by emotional predispositions that help solve commitment problems" and it suggests that the moving force behind moral behaviour "lies not in rational analysis but in emotions". In a social species the ability to make credible commitments (in contrast to credible arguments) is crucial and "confers genuine advantages": the clear irony is that a single-minded pursuit of self-interest is in the long run likely to prove costly.
We know that the world is an uneasy mix of more altruistic and less altruistic persons, of those who will cheat if they can get away with it (witness the rioters who became looters earlier this year in many parts of the country) and those who resist such opportunities. Can we identify unopportunistic persons? Certainly not infallibly, but our intuition that we can is supported by the prisoner's dilemma experiment discussed by Frank. Indeed, that we can do so is "the central premise upon which the the commitment model is based". From this premise, it logically follows that unopportunistic behaviour "will emerge and survive even in a ruthlessly competitive material world".
The commitment model has an impressive intellectual pedigree, its message "in close accord with what eighteenth-century moral philosophers had to say about the motives for moral action". Frank cites David Hume, who "believed that morality was based on sentiment, not logic, and that the most important sentiment was sympathy", and Adam Smith, for whom sympathy played an important role. He provides a fascinating historical sketch showing how such ideas fell out of favour, and how they are now proving very useful in explaining human behaviour. Frank himself has written extensively on these issues over a long career (his latest book,
The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
, contrasts the interests of individuals versus groups); scientists like Joseph LeDoux (
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
) and Antonio Damasio (
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
) have rehabilitated the emotions as essential to how our minds work; and Daniel Kahneman (
Thinking, Fast and Slow
) shows among many other things how momentary emotions are critical in the famous mugs experiment, the standard demonstration of the endowment effect.
There is nothing mystical about the emotions that drive our behaviours: "they are an obvious part of most people's psychological makeup". Robert Frank's impressive achievement in this book is - using well-reasoned arguments - to put them back into that most soulless of subjects, economics, which has for too long laboured under mistaken and misguided notions about human nature. And for those of us concerned over how to agree on a society's norms in the absence of religion, that the "role of material rewards in the commitment model is logically equivalent to religion's threat of damnation" is an extremely valuable piece of the jigsaw.
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Sphex
Transcending narrow rationality
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Great!
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Pour les études
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KS
I bought a used book and the condition wasn't bad at all
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rodrigo
Absolutely incredible
2010年11月30日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
