A curious thing has happened in re- cent years. Economists who founded their whole discipline on the question "What's in it for the individual?" have begun to back away from rugged individualism. Much of recent innovation in economics has been based on the discovery that people are motivated by something other than immediate material self-interest. Just as biology shook off its woolly collectivism and donned the hair shirt of gene-based individualism, economics has begun to go the other way: to try to explain why people do things that are against their apparent interests.
The most successful of those attempts is that by Robert Frank. His is a theory of why we have emotions, founded on a combination of the new cynical biology and the less orthodox economics. It may seem odd that a man who has written a textbook on microeconomics should steal in where psychologists have floundered, and explain the function of emotion. But, as he argues, human motives are the stuff of economics, whether rational and material or not.
Robert Trivers, who brought gene centred cynicism to much of biology, wrote: "Models that attempt to explain altruistic behaviour in terms of natural selection are models designed to take the altruism out of altruism." This is an old idea, as familiar to the Glasgow philosophers of the 18th century as to modern economists such as Amartya Sen: if you are nice to people because it makes you feel better, then your compassion is selfish, not selfless. Likewise, in the world of biology, an ant slaves away celibate on behalf of its sisters not out of the goodness of its little heart (an organ it does not possess in a form that we would recognise), but out of the selfishness of its genes. A vampire bat feeds its neighbours for ultimately selfish reasons. Even baboons that repay social favours are being prudent rather than kind. What passes for virtue is a form of expediency. (Christians should pause before they feel superior: they appear to teach that you should practice selflessness to get to heaven - a pretty big bribe to appeal to their selfishness.)
The key to understanding Robert Frank's theory of the emotions is to keep in mind this distinction between immediate self-interest and ultimate reward. Frank began his seminal book, Passions within Reason, with a description of a bloody massacre by some Hatfields of some McCoys. The murderers were being irrational and self-defeating in their act of quite unnecessary revenge, which in turn led to revenge on them. Any purely rational person would not pursue a feud, any more than he would let guilt prevent him from stealing a friend's wallet. Emotions are profoundly irrational forces, Frank argues, that cannot be explained by material self-interest. Yet they have evolved, like everything else in human nature, for a purpose.
Probe beneath the surface of the individual to its genes and all becomes clear. The ants are selflessly serving the material interests of selfish genes. In the same way, Frank argues that human beings who let emotions rather than rationality govern their lives may be making immediate sacrifices, but in the long term are making choices that benefit their well-being. Moral sentiments-as Frank (and Adam Smith before him) calls the emotions-are problem solving devices designed to make highly social creatures effective at using social relations to their genes' long term advantage. They are a way of settling the conflict between short term expediency and long term prudence in favour of the latter.
Frank's general term for this is the commitment problem. To reap the long term reward of cooperation may require you to forgo the short term temptation of self-interest. Even if you know that, and are determined to reap the long term reward, how do you convince other people you are committed to such a course? The economist Thomas Schelling has dramatised the commitment problem in a story known as the kidnapper's dilemma. Suppose a kidnapper gets cold feet and wishes he had not taken his victim. He proposes to release her but only if she agrees not to give evidence against him. Yet he knows that if he lets her go, she will be grateful, but she will have no reason by then not to break her promise and go straight to the police. She will be out of his power. So she assures him that she will do no such thing, but her assurances carry no conviction; to go back on them will cost her nothing. The dilemma is really hers, not his. How can she commit herself to her side of the bargain? How can she make it costly for herself to break the deal?
Schelling suggested that she should in some way compromise herself, by revealing a terrible crime she has committed in the past so that the kidnapper could be witness against her, and mutual deterrence would ensure that the deal sticks. But how many kidnappers' victims have something as awful as kidnapping to confess to? It is not a realistic solution to the dilemma, which remains insoluble for lack of enforceable commitment.
In real life, however, commitment problems are more soluble, for an intriguing reason. We use our emotions to make credible commitments for us. Consider two of the examples Frank gives. First, two friends consider starting a restaurant, one cooking the food, the other keeping the books; each could easily cheat the other. The cook could exaggerate the cost of food; the accountant could cook the books. Second, a farmer must deter his neighbour from letting cattle stray into his wheat; yet he cannot do so convincingly because the cost of a lawsuit would outweigh the value of the damage done.
These are not esoteric or trivial problems; they are the kind of thing that faces all of us repeatedly throughout life. Yet in each case a purely rational person would come out badly. The rational entrepreneur would not start the restaurant for fear of being cheated-or would herself cheat for fear that her equally rational partner was cheating, and would thereby ruin the business. The rational farmer would not be able to deter his rational neighbour from letting cattle into his wheat, because he would not waste money going to court. To bring reason to such problems, and to assume that others would, is to lose the opportunities they represent. Rational people would be unable to convince each other of their commitment and would never close the deals. But we do not bring reason to such problems; we bring irrational commitment driven by our emotions.
In this way irrational emotions alter the rewards of commitment problems, bringing forward to the present distant costs that would not have arisen in the rational calculation. Rage deters transgressors; guilt makes cheating painful for the cheat; shame punishes; compassion elicits reciprocal compassion. And love commits us to a relationship. Although love may not last, it is by definition a more durable thing than lust. Without love, people would have a permanent and shifting cast of sexual partners none of whom could ever elicit commitment to the bond.
A few years ago, Dutch researchers discovered that if the male of a pair of small birds called blue tits is wounded by a sparrowhawk during egg laying, its mate will promptly seek another male to mate with. This is rational; the wounded male may die or pine away, and the female would be better off with another male. In order to interest another male in rearing her brood, she should give him a share of their paternity. But to human ears, the female's behaviour is almost unbelievably callous and heartless, however sensible it is. Complicated emotions, so characteristic of human beings, prevent us deserting wounded mates. This, in the long run, is to our advantage, for it allows us to keep marriages together in bad times. Our emotions are, as Frank has put it, guarantees of our commitment.
In his original paper on reciprocal altruism, Robert Trivers came up with much the same idea: emotions mediate between our inner calculator and our outer behaviour. Emotions elicit reciprocity in our species, and they direct us towards altruism when it might, in the long run, pay. We like people who are altruistic towards us and are altruistic towards people who like us. The emotions of gratitude and sympathy are surprisingly calculating. Psychological experiments reveal-as experience confirms-that people are much more grateful for acts of kindness that cost the donor some large effort or inconvenience than for easy acts, even if the benefit received is the same. We all know the feeling of resentment at an unsolicited act of generosity whose intent is not to do a kindness but to make us feel the need to do a kindness in return. The emotion of guilt, Trivers argued, is used to repair relationships once the guilty person's cheating has been exposed. People are more likely to make altruistic reparative gestures out of guilt when their cheating has become known to others. All in all, the human emotions looked to Trivers like the highly polished toolkit of a reciprocating social creature.
But whereas Trivers couched his version of the theory in terms of immediate reward through reciprocity, Frank reckons the commitment model rescues the altruism question from the clutches of cynics. It does not try to take the altruism out of altruism. To this a cynic might reasonably reply that the reputation for trustworthiness that honesty earns is itself just reward, amply balancing the costs of occasional altruism. So, in a sense, the commitment model does still take the altruism out of altruism by making altruism into an investment-an investment in a stock called trustworthiness that later pays handsome dividends in others' generosity. This is Trivers's point.
Thus, far from being genuinely altruistic, the cooperative person is merely looking to his long term self-interest, rather than the short term. Far from dethroning the rational man beloved of classical economists, it may be that Frank is merely redefining him in a more realistic way. Amartya Sen has called the caricature of the shortsighted self-interested person a "rational fool." If the rational fool turns out to be taking shortsighted decisions then he is not being rational, just shortsighted. He is indeed a fool who fails to consider the effect of his actions on others.
At the core of Frank's argument lies the idea that acts of genuine goodness are the price we pay for having moral sentiments. So when somebody votes (an irrational thing to do, given the chances of affecting the outcome), tips a waiter in a restaurant she will never revisit, gives an anonymous donation to charity or flies to Rwanda to bathe sick orphans in a refugee camp, she is not, even in the long run, being selfish or rational. She will get no pay-back from those particular acts. But she is prey to sentiments that are designed for another purpose: to elicit trust by demonstrating a capacity for altruism. To put it another way, people do good deeds in order to win prestige that, through indirect reciprocity, they can later cash as a more practical good. Richard Alexander takes the philosopher Peter Singer to task for arguing that the existence of national blood banks that rely on generosity proves people are not motivated by reciprocity. It is true that people give blood in Britain in no expectation that they will get preferential treatment if they need blood themselves. You get a cup of weak tea and a polite thank you. But, says Alexander, "Who among us is not a little humble in the presence of someone who has casually noted that he just came back from giving blood?" People are not generally very secretive about blood donation. Giving blood and working in Rwanda both enhance your reputation for virtue and therefore make people more likely to trust you.
Robert Frank's commitment model is in some ways an old-fashioned idea. What he is saying is that morality and other emotional habits pay. The more you behave in selfless and generous ways, the more you can reap the benefits of cooperative endeavour from society. You get more from life if you irrationally forgo opportunism. The subtle message of both neoclassical economics and neo-Darwinian natural selection-that rational self-interest rules the world and explains people's behaviour-is inadequate and dangerous. Says Frank: "Adam Smith's carrot and Darwin's stick have by now rendered character development a completely forgotten theme in many industrialised countries." Tell your children to be good because in the long run it pays.
Psychologists, among them Jerome Kagan and James Q Wilson, author of The Moral Sense, have converged on similar arguments to Frank-that emotions are mental devices for guaranteeing commitment. But perhaps the most remarkable support for the argument comes from a study of broken brains. There is a small part of the pre-frontal lobe of the human brain which, when damaged, turns you into a rational fool. People who have lost that part of their brain are superficially normal. They suffer no paralysis, no speech defect, no loss in their senses, no diminution in their memory or general intelligence. They do just as well in psychological tests as they did before their accidents. Yet their lives fall apart for reasons that seem more psychiatric than neurological (oh false dichotomy!). They fail to hold down jobs, lose their inhibitions, and become paralytically indecisive.
But this is not all that happens to them. They also literally lose their emotions. They greet misfortune, joyful news and infuriating checks with equanimity and reason. They are simply flat, emotionally. Antonio Damasio, who described these symptoms from 12 patients in his book Descartes's Error, thinks it is no accident that decision making and emotion go together. His patients become so coldblooded about rationally weighing all the facts before them that they cannot make up their minds.
Patience is a virtue, a virtue is a grace, and Grace is a little girl who would not wash her face. This meaningless little ditty now seems to contain a gem of an insight that summarises the commitment model's main discovery. Virtue is indeed a grace-or an instinct as we might put it in these less Augustinian days. It is something to be taken for granted, drawn on and cherished. It is not something we must struggle to create against the grain of human nature-as it would be if we were pigeons, say, or rats with no social machine to oil. It is the instinctive and useful lubricant that is part of our natures. So instead of trying to arrange human institutions in such a way as to reduce human selfishness, perhaps we should be arranging them in such a way as to bring out human virtue.
But there is a paradox in the common view of self-interest. People are generally against it; they despise greed and warn each other against people who have a reputation for too closely pursuing their own ambitions. Similarly, they admire the disinterested altruist; tales of such people's selflessness become legend.
So why are more people not altruists? The exceptions-the Mother Theresas and saints-are almost by definition remarkable and rare. How many people do you know who are true altruists, always thinking about others and never themselves? Very, very few. Indeed, what would you say to somebody close to you who was being truly selfless-a child, say, or a close friend, who was continually turning the other cheek, working for no reward in a hospital emergency room, or giving his weekly pay to charity? If he did it occasionally, you would praise him. But if he did it every week, year after year, you would start to question it. In the nicest way you might hint that he should look out for himself a little more, be just a touch more selfish.
So, while we universally admire selflessness, we do not expect it to rule our lives or those of our close friends. We simply do not practise what we preach. This is perfectly rational. The more other people practise altruism, the better for us, but the more we and our kin pursue self-interest, the better for us.
This helps to explain the general mistrust in which both rational economics and selfish gene biology is held. Both disciplines claim repeatedly and with little effect that they are being misunderstood; they are not recommending selfishness, they are simply recognising it. It is only realistic, economists say, to expect human beings to react to incentives with a view to their self-interest. Likewise, say biologists, it is plausible to expect genes to show an evolved ability to do things that enhance the chances of their own replication. But we tend to see it as a bit naughty to take this view; somehow not politically correct. Richard Dawkins, who coined the phrase "selfish gene," says that he drew attention to the inherent selfishness of genes not to justify it, but the reverse: to alert us to "rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
If the commitment model is right, though, the critics of the selfish schools have a point, for we do live in a world of moral choices. If people are not mechanistic maximisers of self-interest, then to teach them that such behaviour would be logical is to corrupt them. Indeed, this is just what Robert Frank and others have found: students who have been taught the nostrums of neoclassical economics are much more likely to behave selfishly in psychological games than, for instance, astronomy students.
The virtues of tolerance, compassion and justice are not policies towards which we strive, knowing the difficulties upon the way, but commitments we make and expect others to make-gods we pursue. n
