The Strong Reciprocity Cooperative

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When i was a kid, i used to drive a truck a deliver furniture in philadelphia. I'd stop some guy and say, hey, where's gilope street? Well, you go about three blocks op intoe church yor a turn rind lad. Now, that didn't help me at all, but it made him feel real good. He's helping out there, you know. The other side is even more interesting, which is the negative side. People love to hurt people who hurt them. We do it all the time. Go to your sociology book and see if you can find the word on retaliation or on a vengeance in the index of your sociology book.

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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