#164 Herbert Gintis: Sociobiology, Game Theory, Cooperation, And Social Institutions

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Dr. Herbert Gintis is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) headed a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. Professor Gintis is also author of several books including Game Theory Evolving, The Bounds of Reason, A Cooperative Species, Game Theory in Action, and Individuality and Entanglement and also coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies, and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr of Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. 

In this episode, we talk about sociobiology, game theory, and behavioral science in general. First, we talk about the historical and scientific relevance of sociobiology. Then, we go through one of the big projects of Dr. Gintis’ work for the last two decades - a framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences – and the several obstacles that we have to that, including the fact that different behavioral sciences have different approaches and focus on different aspects. We also talk about the relationship between culture and biology. Finally, we go from there to the particularities of human cooperation, group selection, and the role that social institutions play.

Time Links:

01:03 Sociobiology and human behavior

04:37 A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences    

10:52 It makes no sense to talk about individuals or collectives        

17:20 Culture and biology, and gene-culture coevolution       

21:50 The particularities of human cooperation          

25:55 About group selection     

35:24 The function of social institutions in social species    

42:30 The importance of group identity (distributed cognition)  

48:50 Humans are rational, but not in the way you think 

59:05 What is human nature?

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Follow Dr. Gintis’ work:

Faculty page: https://tinyurl.com/y3xj55na

Personal Website: https://people.umass.edu/gintis/

Articles on Researchgate: https://tinyurl.com/y5dzoe2l

Books: https://tinyurl.com/y6ot643p

Books referenced in the int