Right Reason

Chimps, Game Theory, and Morality

 

In "Chimps Rock at Game Theory" at Marginal Revolution, Alex Taborrak discusses a new paper which finds that chimps are actually really good at game theory:

Economics assumes that people are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. Obviously a bad assumption as we are constantly told. Chimps, on the other hand, are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. That is the surprising conclusion to a great paper by Colin Camerer and co-authors. Camerer had chimps play versions of the matching pennies game also called the cat and mouse game. In the cat and mouse game each player can go left or go right. The cat wins when cat and mouse choose the same strategy. The mouse wins when they choose different strategies. In the simple version the best strategy is 50:50, toss a coin. When the payoffs change, however, the optimal strategies still involve randomization but they change in surprising and nonobvious ways. 

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Camerer et al. also tested humans in similar games and they found that humans often deviate from NE play and they adjust their strategies more slowly when payoffs change, i.e. they learn more slowly! The only thing that Camerer didn’t do was to play humans against chimps in the same game. That would have been awesome! 

 

Two important paragraphs in the original paper are:

Ecological experience and development are likely to play an important role too. In the wild, great apes engage in many competitive strategic interactions such as predatory stalking, young chimpanzee wrestling, border patrolling (which is very much like the Inspection game), raiding crops from human farms, and play chasing (“tag”). Because competitive payoff games are common in chimpanzee life, evolutionary theory predicts that chimpanzees would have developed cognitive adaptations to detect patterns in opponent behavior and to create predictability in their own behavior. More generally, chimpanzees are capable of strategic thinking in cooperative hunting, sneaky copulation, future planning, and many elements of theory of mind computation. Some have argued that the capacity to randomize effectively evolved because primate predatory behavior and routine social interaction selects for unpredictability in counter-strategies. Experiments also show that chimpanzees are better at competitive tasks than at comparable cooperative ones.

In contrast, humans are relatively highly prosocial and cooperative. As human children begin to speak and acculturate, their play shifts between ages 2 to 4 from solitary and parallel play, to associative and cooperative play. While young chimpanzees continue to hone their competitive skills with constant practice, their young human counterparts shift from competition to verbally-facilitated cooperation.

 

We may think of human beings as great rational calculators, but what matters more to being human is the ability to cooperate. When it comes to being human, morality and the sense of duty, two factors which throw in complications to the prediction of human behavior with game theory, outweigh rational calculation. Charles Darwin even noted this in The Descent of Man when he wrote: 

I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh remarks, ‘has a rightful supremacy over ever other principle of human action’; it is summed in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance (Darwin 1989[1877]: 101 [97]). 

 

Trucking, Bartering, and Trading: Unnecessary Propensities

 

Piaget, who was originally trained as a biologist, views intellectual development as an interaction of an inherited genetic program with the environment. It is no coincidence that he calls this conception "genetic epistemology," in effect the study of the hereditary unfolding of understanding.

- Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature

 

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith writes of the division of labor as a “very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter,  and exchange one thing for another” (WN I.ii.1). Smith’s focus on the propensity to truck, barter, and trade, as we tend to say today. For one thing, if the propensity to truck, barter, and trade is to have any meaning, then it must be some primordial propensity within humanity, but it simply isn’t. 

 

Nobody ever paces around their house at night thinking that they haven’t traded enough. Nobody ever goes outside of their home’s doors in the morning thinking about how they can relieve that itch to truck, barter, and trade. Instead, someone paces around their house at night thinking about how they will pay their bills after being laid off from a job they held for years. Instead, someone leaves their doors thinking about finally getting that Playstation 4, or BMW, that they had long been desiring. 

When those people pay their bills or buy that coveted item, to speak as if they are expressing some innate propensity to truck, barter, and trade is misguided. After all, the people in question aren’t acting out of a desire to truck, barter, and trade; instead, they are acting out of a desire to see their own betterment. The propensity to truck, barter, and trade is itself a manifestation of something more fundamental to human motivation: the propensity for improvement. 

The propensity for improvement has many manifestations, and it is better to speak how that, more fundamental propensity, manifests itself across different contexts. For example, many have written about the propensity to rape, murder, and steal as a propensity opposed to the propensity , yet that propensity is itself merely a manifestation of the propensity for improvement. People rape, murder, and steal for reasons much alike to why they truck, barter, and trade: the desire to improve their current circumstances. Talking about those two propensities as two different sides of human nature which we need to direct and channel is at worse obfuscating the main issue and at best adding more parts than needed to the discussion. 

 

The main drive of the discussion is not that people have an innate desire to truck, barter, and trade; instead, it is that institutional contexts influence how people will interact. If we talk about propensities to truck, barter, and trade, and to rape, pillage, and murder, then we are speaking about a dual nature within the human soul which are opposed to one another. Yes, humanity has opposing desires, but talk of two contrasting propensities just rings too Manichean too me. The reality is much more muddled. What is really happening is that people are generally act so as to improve their lives. What they actually do is determined by the particular circumstances they face in the course of their lives. 

The persona dramatis is not the container of two conflicting captains seeking to pilot the ship, but people who are seeking how to better their conditions. Talk about different propensities only serves to introduce unnecessary and misleading aspects into the narrative. Smith’s talk about the origin or the division of labor just needs a discussion of the human propensity to seek a better world. He could’ve done without talk about a propensity to truck, barter, and trade so today we shouldn’t consider ourselves at all obligated in following with such talk as well.