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2010 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

7. The Evolutionary Biology of Rational Behavior

verfasst von : Prof. Richard B. McKenzie

Erschienen in: Predictably Rational?

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Abstract

Modern neoclassical microeconomics has developed in an era in which evolutionary biology and neurobiology have flourished with their many important insights on why people today behave the way they do. And the experts’ explanation is fairly straightforward: There remains a great deal of noise in people’s behavior (mainly because human intellectual, physical, and emotional evolution has never stopped), but when the noise is stripped away, today’s people do what they do in large measure because of how their basic physiological and mental functionalities evolved long ago. Those evolved functionalities continue to constrain modern human behavior. These insights from evolutionary theory (and neurobiology that will be considered in the following chapter) have been integrated into a number of physical and social disciplines, most notably psychology. “Evolutionary psychologists” have posited evolutionary grounds for human behaviors, not the least of which are entrenched mating behaviors that help explain male/female interactions today. Although evolutionary and neurobiological theories have filtered into modern microeconomics (mainly through developments in the emerging subdisciplines of bioeconomics and neuroeconomics, initially pushed forward with the work of Rubin and Paul [1979] and Hirshleifer [1982, 1984, 1993]), standard microeconomics textbook discussions of rational behavior continue to stand largely apart from the evolutionary and neurobiological influences that must have shaped exactly how rational people can be today.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Behavioral Economists, and Psychologists’ Challenges to Rational Behavior

Nächstes Kapitel The Neuroeconomics of Rational Decision Making

Even astrophysics have extended evolutionary theory backwards, given that they have established origins for the evolution of life that predates life’s primordial beginnings on Earth, namely in the chemical caldrons of exploding red giant stars, if not in the Big Bang, the presumed origins of the universe as we can now know it.

Hayek observed at the end of his classic essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”

Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people’s knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem (1945, p. 291).

Although as Becker and Murphy (1988) and Becker (1962) write, even irrational behavior and random behavior, respectively, can also lead to the law of demand.

Sexual selection may be more important for humans than for most other species. This is because in most species males compete for females, and females choose males, so only females engage in sexual selection. However, in humans, males invest in offspring, so males desire females who will produce the most fit offspring, at least for long-term mating. This means that both sexes engage in sexual competition and are subject to sexual selection, according to Geoffrey Miller (2001). This will have important implications for the shape of human utility functions, although Miller probably goes too far in attributing human behavior to sexual selection.

Much human behavior today can also be attributed to ongoing evolutionary mutations and adaptations that remain a work in process, which is to say that not all observed behaviors can be fully adapted behaviors and can be in the process of being replaced by the spread of some superior variation.

When the study was redone and expanded to include three hundred non-urban, non-Western societies, much the same conclusion was drawn (Gregersen 1982).

Social status and relative wealth in the Pleistocene hunter-gathers greatly affect the number of mates and progeny males had. Perhaps15 percent of the males were successful in attracting more than one mate (Geary 1998).

In surveys undertaken in thirty-three countries on six continents, evolutionary psychologist David Buss found that females rated males’ good financial prospects more highly than males rated females’ good financial prospects. On the other hand, males rated female physical attractiveness far higher than females rated males’ physical attractiveness (Buss 1989 and 1990). Other research shows that males who marry in any given year earn about 50 percent more than unmarried males of the same age, suggesting that modern females continue to select mates based on their command over resources (Trivers 1985).

Psychologist Devendra Singh (1993 and 1994) showed men from the United States, Britain, Australia, India, Uganda, and several other countries line drawings of women with various waist-to-hip ratios, and most men chose the drawings with a ratio of 70 percent. He found that sculptures and paintings, dating back as much as thirty-two thousand years, had much the same proportions, as do Playboy magazine centerfolds have much the same proportions. During ovulation, women’s hip-to-waist ratios tend to adjust toward 70 percent, giving them a greater chance of being selected for mating. And Singh found that women with the 70 percent ratios are more likely to become pregnant because of their underlying body chemistry (including the proportions of estrogen and testosterone, although such findings have not always been supported by other studies.) See, for example, Marlowe, Apicella, and Reed (2005). Physically attractive females have been found to be able to marry with greater frequency males with high occupational and social status than less attractive females (Buss 1989; Elder 1969; Taylor and Glenn 1976; Udry and Eckland 1984). The evidence on this point is so strong that one researcher concluded that females’ attractiveness is the best of all predictors of their male partners’ social and economic status (Elder 1969).

For more findings supporting the this evolutionary view of gender differences in mating attractors that could give rise to a gender average-pay gap see Harrison and Saeed 1977; Buss 2003; Green, Buchanan, and Heuer 1984; Townsend and Levy 1990a; Townsend and Levy 1990b; Sadalla, Kenrick, and Vershure 1987; Beigel 1954; Gillis and Avis 1980; Gillis 1982; Cameron, Oskamp, and Sparks 1978; Lynn and Shurgot 1984; and Townsend 1987.

I must note, however, that while an assumption of full or perfect rationality may not have survival value in real-world evolutionary process, it could still have, for good reason, survival value in theory, a point to which I return in the last chapter.

This line of argument is an adaptation of an argument Roy Radner (1998) made, pointing out that firms that survived into the long run were likely dominated by firms that did not seek to maximize profits.

When consumers are faced with twenty flavors of jam, the binary comparisons reach past twelve million.

Citing the work of others, Rubin quotes Matt Ridley: “One man made stone tools, another knew how to find game, a third was especially good at throwing spears, a fourth could be relied upon as a strategist (1996, p. 49), but then Rubin adds, “But in a group of 50 or 150 individuals, the likely group size during much of the EEA [Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness], there would not have been full-time work for most of these specialties. Rather, while people may have had the skills Ridley mentions, they would have been unlikely to engage in these activities on a full-time basis. That is, while there may have been some limited amount of specialization, the hunter who knew how to find game would have thrown spears at it as well, and the spear thrower might have engaged in butchering if his spear hit” (2002, pp. 19–20, also citing in other places to make this point Stiner et al. 1998; Knauft 1991; and Kelly 1995).

Adam Smith made his kindness point when he wrote,

Of all the persons, however, whom nature points out for our peculiar beneficence, there are none to whom it seems more properly directed than to those whose beneficence we have ourselves already experienced. Nature, which formed men for that mutual kindness, so necessary for their happiness, renders every man the peculiar object of kindness, to the persons to whom he himself has been kind. Though their gratitude should not always correspond to his beneficence, yet the sense of his merit, the sympathetic gratitude of the impartial spectator, will always correspond to it. The general indignation of other people, against the baseness of their ingratitude, will even, sometimes, increase the general sense of his merit. No benevolent man ever lost altogether the fruits of his benevolence. If he does not always gather them from the persons from whom he ought to have gathered them, he seldom fails to gather them, and with a tenfold increase, from other people. Kindness is the parent of kindness; and if to be beloved by our brethren be the great object of our ambition, the surest way of obtaining it is, by our conduct to show that we really love them (1759, Sect. VI.II.22).

I understand this is a claim with which some neurobiologists take issue, because they view behaviors developing from external world experience doing nothing more than activating and shaping genetically implanted neuro-circuits. What appears to be “learning” is the shaping of circuits from repeated activation. People “learn” from their experiences in much the same way that the immune system “learns” by developing particular antibodies in response to an invasion of the body by specific antigens (Gazzaniga 1992). I know of no way to settle whether this way of thinking is more correct than the economic way of thinking that presumes a capacity for value assessments. In the end, such a distinction may not make a difference, and both could be complementary ways of thinking through why people behave as they do.

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Titel: The Evolutionary Biology of Rational Behavior
verfasst von: Prof. Richard B. McKenzie
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Buch: Predictably Rational?
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-01585-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-642-01586-1

Copyright-Jahr: 2010
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01586-1_7

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