The Strategic Role of Emotions
Passions Within Reason (by Robert H. Frank)
Beyond Self-Interest
We leave tips in restaurants in distant cities we will never visit again. We make anonymous contributions to private charities. We often refrain from cheating even when we are sure cheating would not be detected. We sometimes walk away from profitable transactions because we believe the terms to be "unfair".
Behavior of this sort poses a fundamental challenge to those who believe that people generally pursue self-interest. Many actions, purposely taken with full knowledge of their consequences are irrational. If people did not perform them, they would be better off and they know it.
Passions often serve our interests very well, because we face important problems that simply cannot be solved by rational action. The common feature of these problems is that to solve them we must commit ourselves to behave in ways that may later prove contrary to our interests.
The self-interest model has proven its usefulness for understanding and predicting human behavior. But it remains seriously incomplete. Most analysts regard irrational behavior motivated by emotions as lying beyond the scope of the model. However, it is neither necessary nor productive to adopt this view. With careful attention to the things people care about, and to why they care about them, we can gain a much clearer understanding of why we behave as we do.
The commitment problems
In everyday economic and social interaction, we repeatedly encounter commitment problems. A specific emotions act as commitment devices help resolve these dilemmas.
Consider a person who threatens to retaliate against anyone who harms him. For his threat to deter, others must believe he will carry it out. If he is known in advance to have that preference, he is not likely to be tested by aggression in the first place.
Similarly, a person who is know to "dislike" an unfair bargain can credibly threaten to walk away from one, even when it is in her narrow interest to accept it. By virtue of being know to have this preference she becomes a more effective negotiator.
The person who "feels bad" when he cheats, and if others realize he feels this way, they will seek him as a partner in ventures that require trust.
Being know to experience certain emotions enables us to make commitments that would otherwise not be credible. The irony here is that this ability, which springs from a failure to pursue self-interest, confers advantages. Granted, following through on these commitments will always involve avoidable losses -- not cheating when there is a chance to, retaliating at great cost even after the damage is done, and so on.
However, the problem is that being unable to make credible commitments will often be even more costly. Confronted with the commitment problem, an opportunistic person fares poorly.
Emotions as Commitments
A person's feelings "commit" him to act in certain ways. A person who has not eaten for several days is "committed" to eat, someone who has not slept for several days is "committed" to sleep. Such commitments are often advantageous even though we might be able to show in a particular case that it is not in a hungry person's interest to eat. Commitments of this sort are neither strictly binding nor irrevocable. They are merely incentives to behave in a particular way.
The concern here will be with the role of such emotions as guilt, anger, envy and even love. These emotions often predispose us to behave in ways that are contrary to our narrow interests, and being thus predisposed can be an advantage.
For it to be, others must have some way of discovering we have these emotional commitments. But, how do people know that a person's feelings commit him to behave honestly in the face of a golden opportunity to cheat? It concerns the subtle clues by which we infer such behavioral predispositions in others.
Clues to behavioral predispositions
There are numerous behavioral clues to people's feelings. Posture, the rate of respiration, the pitch and timbre of the voice, perspiration, facial muscle tone and expression, and movement of the eyes, are among the signals we can read. We apparently know, even if we cannot articulate, how a forced smile differs from one that is heartfelt.
At least partly on the basis of such clues, we form judgments about the emotional makeup of the people with whom we deal. Some people we sense we can trust, but of others we remain ever wary. Some we sense can be taken advantage of, others we know instinctively not to provoke.
Being able to make such judgements accurately has always been an obvious advantage. But it may be no less an advantage that others be able to make similar assessments about our own propensities.
The problem of mimicry
If there are advantages in being trustworthy and being perceived as such, there are even greater advantages in appearing to have, but not actually having, these qualities. A liar who appears trustworthy will have better opportunities. Hitler was apparently someone who could lie convincingly. In September 1938 meeting, Hitler promised British PM Chamberlain that he would not go to war if the borders of Czechoslovakia were redrawn to meet his demands. Chamberlain wrote a letter to his sister: "I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he gave his word."
Clues to behavioral predispositions are obviously not perfect. Some emotions are more difficult to simulate than others. No matter what the emotion, we can almost never be certain that what we see is genuine. It will always be possible for at least some people to succeed at deception. A climate thus lacking in vigilance would create profitable opportunities for cheaters.
There is uneasy balance between people who really possess the underlying emotions and others who merely seem to. Those who are adept at reading the relevant signals will be more successful than others. There is also a payoff to those who are able to send effective signals about their own behavioral predispositions, and, there will also be a niche for those who are skillful at pretending to have feelings they really lack.
Motives for honesty
Whether people honor their agreements when they expect to interact repeatedly with us is obviously important. If character traits like honesty are observable in a person, an honest person will benefit by being able to solve important commitment problems.
The opportunist's goal is to appear honest while availing himself of every prudent opportunity for personal gain. He wants to seem like a good guy to the people who count. In order to appear honest, it may be necessary, at least, to be honest.
The invisible hand
In Adam Smith's scheme, the quest for personal gain often benefits others. The merchant in pursuit of his own profits acts as if guided by an invisible hand to supply the products we most desire. Yet, Smith held no illusions that the consequences were always benign. "People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices."
Selfishness and Darwinian model
If human nature, too, was shaped by the forces of natural selection, poeple's behavior must be fundamentally selfish.
Kin-Selection
According to Hamilton, an individual will often be able to promote its own genetic future by making sacrifices on behalf of others who carry copies of its genes. The kin-selection model predicts that parents will make altruistic sacrifices on behalf of their offspring, brothers on behalf of sisters, and so on. This model fits comfortably within Darwinian framework, and has clearly established predictive power, even predicts specific conflicts between relatives. This model is not really self-sacrificing behavior at all.
Genetic relatedness declines extremely once we leave the confines of the nuclear family. Siblings share half of their genes in common, first cousins only one-eight, second cousins only one thirty-second. Thus, second cousins are little different from perfect strangers. Than the kin-selection model predicts a small payoff from helping them.
Reciprocal altruism
Altruism toward non-kin is explained with a theory of reciprocal altruism, in which people act benevolently toward others in the expectation of being recognized and reward by some reciprocal act of kindness in the future. The "soft-core altruism" actions undertaken with the expectation that society will reciprocate.
Tit-for-Tat and the Prisoner's Dilemma
The pursuit of self-interest often leads people astray. In many circumstances, we can achieve what we seek only if we each set aside personal interest. The mathematician, A.W. Tucker discovered the simple game of "prisoner's dilemma". Two prisoners are held in separate cells for a serious crime that they did. The prosecutor, however, has only enough hard evidence to convict them of a minor offense, for which the penalty is a year in jail. Each prisoner is told that if one confesses while the other remains silent, the confessor will go free while the other spends 20 years in person. If both confess, they will get an intermediate sentence, 5 years. The two prisoners are not allowed to communicate with one another.
The dominant strategy is to confess. No matter what Y does, X gets a lighter sentence by speaking out: if Y too confesses, X gets 5 years instead of 20 and if Y remains silent, X goes free.
The payoffs are perfectly symmetric, so Y also does better to confess, no matter what X does.
The difficulty is that when each behaves in a self-interested way, both do worse than if each had shown restraint. Thus, when both confess, they get 5 years, instead of the 1 year they could have gotten by remaining silent.
Their problem is a lack of trust. If each could promise not to confess, each would still do better if he broke his promise.
Psychologists investigated how people actually behave when confronted with prisoner's dilemma, by giving the players choices "cooperate" or "defect".
The dominant strategy for a single play is to defect. A higher payoff is achieved by defecting, no matter what the other player does. The players each do better when both cooperate than when both defect.
The discovery was that people show a strong tendency to cooperate when they play repeatedly with the same partner. The reason is simple. If the game is to be played many times, a cooperator has the opportunity to retaliate if his partner defects. Once it becomes apparent that defection invites retaliation, both parties usually settle into a pattern of mutual cooperation. The strategy of rewarding cooperation and retaliating against defection dubbed as "tit-for-tat", defined as cooperate on the first move, then on each successive move do whatever the other player did on the previous move. A pair of tit-for-tat players receives the largest possible aggregate payoff.
The emergence of cooperation requires a reasonably stable set of players, each of who can remember what other players have done in previous interactions. It also requires that players have a significant stake in what happens in the future. The higher payoffs inherent in successful cooperation then cause cooperators to comprise a growing share of the population.
The "live-and-let-live" system developed in the trench warfare in Europe during World War I.
Mediating Emotions
Selection may favor distrusting those who perform altruistic acts without the emotional basis of generosity or guilt because the altruistic tendencies of such individuals may be less reliable in the future. Parallel roles for other mediating emotions are moralistic aggression, friendship, and sympathy. The presence of such emotions can help account for many observations that pure calculations about reciprocity cannot. For example, the expectation of reciprocal benefits is no reason to tip in a restaurant in a distance city, but generosity or sympathy may provide ample motive to do so.
The moralistic aggression is to punish people who refuse to return a favor. But, someone motivated by moralistic aggression may waste energy trying to punish others with whom he know he will never interact agian. This is often a good thing from society's point of view.
Beyond Self-Interest
We leave tips in restaurants in distant cities we will never visit again. We make anonymous contributions to private charities. We often refrain from cheating even when we are sure cheating would not be detected. We sometimes walk away from profitable transactions because we believe the terms to be "unfair".
Behavior of this sort poses a fundamental challenge to those who believe that people generally pursue self-interest. Many actions, purposely taken with full knowledge of their consequences are irrational. If people did not perform them, they would be better off and they know it.
Passions often serve our interests very well, because we face important problems that simply cannot be solved by rational action. The common feature of these problems is that to solve them we must commit ourselves to behave in ways that may later prove contrary to our interests.
The self-interest model has proven its usefulness for understanding and predicting human behavior. But it remains seriously incomplete. Most analysts regard irrational behavior motivated by emotions as lying beyond the scope of the model. However, it is neither necessary nor productive to adopt this view. With careful attention to the things people care about, and to why they care about them, we can gain a much clearer understanding of why we behave as we do.
The commitment problems
In everyday economic and social interaction, we repeatedly encounter commitment problems. A specific emotions act as commitment devices help resolve these dilemmas.
Consider a person who threatens to retaliate against anyone who harms him. For his threat to deter, others must believe he will carry it out. If he is known in advance to have that preference, he is not likely to be tested by aggression in the first place.
Similarly, a person who is know to "dislike" an unfair bargain can credibly threaten to walk away from one, even when it is in her narrow interest to accept it. By virtue of being know to have this preference she becomes a more effective negotiator.
The person who "feels bad" when he cheats, and if others realize he feels this way, they will seek him as a partner in ventures that require trust.
Being know to experience certain emotions enables us to make commitments that would otherwise not be credible. The irony here is that this ability, which springs from a failure to pursue self-interest, confers advantages. Granted, following through on these commitments will always involve avoidable losses -- not cheating when there is a chance to, retaliating at great cost even after the damage is done, and so on.
However, the problem is that being unable to make credible commitments will often be even more costly. Confronted with the commitment problem, an opportunistic person fares poorly.
Emotions as Commitments
A person's feelings "commit" him to act in certain ways. A person who has not eaten for several days is "committed" to eat, someone who has not slept for several days is "committed" to sleep. Such commitments are often advantageous even though we might be able to show in a particular case that it is not in a hungry person's interest to eat. Commitments of this sort are neither strictly binding nor irrevocable. They are merely incentives to behave in a particular way.
The concern here will be with the role of such emotions as guilt, anger, envy and even love. These emotions often predispose us to behave in ways that are contrary to our narrow interests, and being thus predisposed can be an advantage.
For it to be, others must have some way of discovering we have these emotional commitments. But, how do people know that a person's feelings commit him to behave honestly in the face of a golden opportunity to cheat? It concerns the subtle clues by which we infer such behavioral predispositions in others.
Clues to behavioral predispositions
There are numerous behavioral clues to people's feelings. Posture, the rate of respiration, the pitch and timbre of the voice, perspiration, facial muscle tone and expression, and movement of the eyes, are among the signals we can read. We apparently know, even if we cannot articulate, how a forced smile differs from one that is heartfelt.
At least partly on the basis of such clues, we form judgments about the emotional makeup of the people with whom we deal. Some people we sense we can trust, but of others we remain ever wary. Some we sense can be taken advantage of, others we know instinctively not to provoke.
Being able to make such judgements accurately has always been an obvious advantage. But it may be no less an advantage that others be able to make similar assessments about our own propensities.
The problem of mimicry
If there are advantages in being trustworthy and being perceived as such, there are even greater advantages in appearing to have, but not actually having, these qualities. A liar who appears trustworthy will have better opportunities. Hitler was apparently someone who could lie convincingly. In September 1938 meeting, Hitler promised British PM Chamberlain that he would not go to war if the borders of Czechoslovakia were redrawn to meet his demands. Chamberlain wrote a letter to his sister: "I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he gave his word."
Clues to behavioral predispositions are obviously not perfect. Some emotions are more difficult to simulate than others. No matter what the emotion, we can almost never be certain that what we see is genuine. It will always be possible for at least some people to succeed at deception. A climate thus lacking in vigilance would create profitable opportunities for cheaters.
There is uneasy balance between people who really possess the underlying emotions and others who merely seem to. Those who are adept at reading the relevant signals will be more successful than others. There is also a payoff to those who are able to send effective signals about their own behavioral predispositions, and, there will also be a niche for those who are skillful at pretending to have feelings they really lack.
Motives for honesty
Whether people honor their agreements when they expect to interact repeatedly with us is obviously important. If character traits like honesty are observable in a person, an honest person will benefit by being able to solve important commitment problems.
The opportunist's goal is to appear honest while availing himself of every prudent opportunity for personal gain. He wants to seem like a good guy to the people who count. In order to appear honest, it may be necessary, at least, to be honest.
The invisible hand
In Adam Smith's scheme, the quest for personal gain often benefits others. The merchant in pursuit of his own profits acts as if guided by an invisible hand to supply the products we most desire. Yet, Smith held no illusions that the consequences were always benign. "People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices."
Selfishness and Darwinian model
If human nature, too, was shaped by the forces of natural selection, poeple's behavior must be fundamentally selfish.
Kin-Selection
According to Hamilton, an individual will often be able to promote its own genetic future by making sacrifices on behalf of others who carry copies of its genes. The kin-selection model predicts that parents will make altruistic sacrifices on behalf of their offspring, brothers on behalf of sisters, and so on. This model fits comfortably within Darwinian framework, and has clearly established predictive power, even predicts specific conflicts between relatives. This model is not really self-sacrificing behavior at all.
Genetic relatedness declines extremely once we leave the confines of the nuclear family. Siblings share half of their genes in common, first cousins only one-eight, second cousins only one thirty-second. Thus, second cousins are little different from perfect strangers. Than the kin-selection model predicts a small payoff from helping them.
Reciprocal altruism
Altruism toward non-kin is explained with a theory of reciprocal altruism, in which people act benevolently toward others in the expectation of being recognized and reward by some reciprocal act of kindness in the future. The "soft-core altruism" actions undertaken with the expectation that society will reciprocate.
Tit-for-Tat and the Prisoner's Dilemma
The pursuit of self-interest often leads people astray. In many circumstances, we can achieve what we seek only if we each set aside personal interest. The mathematician, A.W. Tucker discovered the simple game of "prisoner's dilemma". Two prisoners are held in separate cells for a serious crime that they did. The prosecutor, however, has only enough hard evidence to convict them of a minor offense, for which the penalty is a year in jail. Each prisoner is told that if one confesses while the other remains silent, the confessor will go free while the other spends 20 years in person. If both confess, they will get an intermediate sentence, 5 years. The two prisoners are not allowed to communicate with one another.
The dominant strategy is to confess. No matter what Y does, X gets a lighter sentence by speaking out: if Y too confesses, X gets 5 years instead of 20 and if Y remains silent, X goes free.
The payoffs are perfectly symmetric, so Y also does better to confess, no matter what X does.
The difficulty is that when each behaves in a self-interested way, both do worse than if each had shown restraint. Thus, when both confess, they get 5 years, instead of the 1 year they could have gotten by remaining silent.
Their problem is a lack of trust. If each could promise not to confess, each would still do better if he broke his promise.
Psychologists investigated how people actually behave when confronted with prisoner's dilemma, by giving the players choices "cooperate" or "defect".
The dominant strategy for a single play is to defect. A higher payoff is achieved by defecting, no matter what the other player does. The players each do better when both cooperate than when both defect.
The discovery was that people show a strong tendency to cooperate when they play repeatedly with the same partner. The reason is simple. If the game is to be played many times, a cooperator has the opportunity to retaliate if his partner defects. Once it becomes apparent that defection invites retaliation, both parties usually settle into a pattern of mutual cooperation. The strategy of rewarding cooperation and retaliating against defection dubbed as "tit-for-tat", defined as cooperate on the first move, then on each successive move do whatever the other player did on the previous move. A pair of tit-for-tat players receives the largest possible aggregate payoff.
The emergence of cooperation requires a reasonably stable set of players, each of who can remember what other players have done in previous interactions. It also requires that players have a significant stake in what happens in the future. The higher payoffs inherent in successful cooperation then cause cooperators to comprise a growing share of the population.
The "live-and-let-live" system developed in the trench warfare in Europe during World War I.
Mediating Emotions
Selection may favor distrusting those who perform altruistic acts without the emotional basis of generosity or guilt because the altruistic tendencies of such individuals may be less reliable in the future. Parallel roles for other mediating emotions are moralistic aggression, friendship, and sympathy. The presence of such emotions can help account for many observations that pure calculations about reciprocity cannot. For example, the expectation of reciprocal benefits is no reason to tip in a restaurant in a distance city, but generosity or sympathy may provide ample motive to do so.
The moralistic aggression is to punish people who refuse to return a favor. But, someone motivated by moralistic aggression may waste energy trying to punish others with whom he know he will never interact agian. This is often a good thing from society's point of view.
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