Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T21:13:08.433Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

What is seen and what is not seen in the economy: An effect of our evolved psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Pascal Boyer
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychology and Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130. [email protected]
Michael Bang Petersen
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. [email protected]://au.dk/en/michael@ps

Abstract

Specific features of our evolved cognitive architecture explain why some aspects of the economy are “seen” and others are “not seen.” Drawing from the commentaries of economists, psychologists, and other social scientists on our original proposal, we propose a more precise model of the acquisition and spread of folk-beliefs about the economy. In particular, we try to provide a clearer delimitation of the field of folk-economic beliefs (sect. R2) and to dispel possible misunderstandings of the role of variation in evolutionary psychology (sect. R3). We also comment on the difficulty of explaining folk-economic beliefs in terms of domain-general processes or biases (sect. R4), as developmental studies show how encounters with specific environments calibrate domain-specific systems (sect. R5). We offer a more detailed description of the connections between economic beliefs and political psychology (sect. R6) and of the probable causes of individual variation in that domain (sect. R7). Taken together, these arguments point to a better integration or consilience between economics and human evolution (sect. R8).

Type
Authors' Response
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aarøe, L. & Petersen, M. B. (2013) Hunger games: Fluctuations in blood glucose levels influence support for social welfare. Psychological Science 24(12):2550–56. doi: 10.1177/0956797613495244.Google Scholar
Alexandrova, A. & Northcott, R. (2013) It's just a feeling: Why economic models do not explain. Journal of Economic Methodology 20(3):262–67. doi: 10.1080/1350178X.2013.828873.Google Scholar
Atran, S. A. (1998) Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21(4):547–69.Google Scholar
Barclay, P. & Willer, R. (2007) Partner choice creates competitive altruism in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 274(1610):749–53.Google Scholar
Barrett, H. C. (2005) Enzymatic computation and cognitive modularity. Mind and Language 20(3):259–87.Google Scholar
Bastiat, C. F. (1850/2007) That which is seen and that which is not seen. In: The Bastiat collection, vol. 1, ed. Bastiat, C. F., pp. 148. The Ludwig von Mises Institute. (Original work published in 1850).Google Scholar
Baumard, N., André, J. B. & Sperber, D. (2013a) A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(1):5978.Google Scholar
Baumard, N., André, J.-B. & Sperber, D. (2013b) Partner choice, fairness, and the extension of morality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(1):102–22. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X12000672.Google Scholar
Bøggild, T. & Petersen, M. B. (2016) The evolved functions of procedural fairness: An adaptation for politics. In: The evolution of morality, ed. Shackelford, T. & Hansen, R., pp. 247–76. Springer.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (1985) Culture and the evolutionary process. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. (2015) How natural selection shapes conceptual structure: Human intuitions and concepts of ownership. In: The conceptual mind. New directions in the study of concepts, ed. Margolis, E. & Laurence, S., pp. 185200. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. (2018) Minds make societies: How cognition explains the world humans create. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. & Petersen, M. B. (2012) The naturalness of (many) social institutions: Evolved cognition as their foundation. Journal of Institutional Economics 8(01):125. doi: 10.1017/S1744137411000300.Google Scholar
Brennan, J. F. & Jaworski, P. (2015) Markets without limits: Moral virtues and commercial interests. Routledge/Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Caplan, B. (2006) How do voters form positive economic beliefs? Evidence from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. Public Choice 128(3–4):367–81. doi: 10.1007/s11127-006-9026-z.Google Scholar
Caplan, B. (2008) The myth of the rational voter: Why democracies choose bad policies. (New edition, with a new preface by the author). Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Capra, C. M. & Rubin, P. H. (2011) Rationality and uility: Economics and evolutionary psychology. In: Evolutionary psychology in the business sciences, ed. Saad, G., pp. 319–38. Springer.Google Scholar
Delton, A. W. & Cimino, A. (2010) Exploring the evolved concept of NEWCOMER: Experimental tests of a cognitive model. Evolutionary Psychology 8(2):317–35.Google Scholar
Delton, A. W., Cosmides, L., Guemo, M., Robertson, T. E. & Tooby, J. (2012) The psychosemantics of free riding: Dissecting the architecture of a moral concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102(6):1252–70. doi: 10.1037/a0027026.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P. & Kurzban, R. (2013) A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin 139(2):477–96. doi: 10.1037/a0029065.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P., Massenkoff, M., Shaw, A., Petersen, M. B. & Kurzban, R. (2014) Equity or equality? Moral judgments follow the money. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 281(1797):e20142112.Google Scholar
Druckman, J. N., Peterson, E. & Slothuus, R. (2013) How elite partisan polarization affects public opinion formation. American Political Science Review 107(1):5779.Google Scholar
Dzialowski, A. R., Lennon, J. T., O'Brien, W. J. & Smith, V. H. (2003) Predator-induced phenotypic plasticity in the exotic cladoceran Daphnia lumholtzi. Freshwater Biology 48(9):1593–602.Google Scholar
Fiske, A. P. & Tetlock, P. E. (1997) Taboo trade-offs: Reactions to transactions that transgress the spheres of justice. Political Psychology 18(2):255–97.Google Scholar
Gallistel, C. R. & King, A. P. (2011) Memory and the computational brain: Why cognitive science will transform neuroscience: Wiley.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. (2004) Psychological essentialism in children. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(9):404409.Google Scholar
German, T. P. & Leslie, A. M. (2000) Attending to and learning about mental states. In: Children's reasoning and the mind, ed. Mitchell, P. & Riggs, K. J., pp. 229–52. Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis (UK).Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, G. & Selten, R., eds. (2001) Bounded rationality: The adaptive toolbox. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Are ethnic groups biological “species” to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories. Current Anthropology 42(4):515–54. doi: 10.1086/321802.Google Scholar
Haidt, J. & Joseph, C. (2004) Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus 133(4):5566. (Special Issue on human nature). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365555Google Scholar
Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B. & Alford, J. R. (2013) Predisposed: Liberals, conservatives, and the biology of political differences. Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, L. A. (1994) Is the acquisition of social categories based on domain-specific competence or on knowledge transfer? In: Mapping the mind: Domain-specificity in culture and cognition, ed. Hirschfeld, L. A. & Gelman, S. A., pp. 201–34. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, L. A. & Gelman, S. A., eds. (1994a) Mapping the mind: Domain-specificity in culture and cognition. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, L. A. & Gelman, S. A. (1994b) Toward a topography of mind: An introduction to domain specificity. In: Mapping the mind: Domain-specificity in culture and cognition, ed. Hirschfeld, L. A. & Gelman, S. A., pp. 337. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, L. A. & Gelman, S. A. (1999) How biological is essentialism? In: Folk-biology, ed. Atran, S. & Douglas, M., pp. 403446. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, S. G. B., Zhang, J. & Keil, F. C. (2018b) Psychological underpinnings of zero-sum thinking. Working Paper. (January 28, 2018; posted Online on February 15, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3117627 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3117627.Google Scholar
Kelly, R. L. (1995) The foraging spectrum: Diversity in hunter-gatherer lifeways. Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Koppl, R., ed. (2005) Evolutionary psychology and economic theory. (Book Series: Advances in Austrian Economics, vol. 7). Emerald Group.Google Scholar
Krasnow, M. M., Delton, A. W., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2013) Meeting now suggests we will meet again: Implications for debates on the evolution of cooperation. Nature Scientific Reports 3: article no. 1747. doi: 10.1038/srep01747.Google Scholar
Kunda, Z. (1990) The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 108(3):480.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors we live by, vol. 3. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Leeper, T. J. & Slothuus, R. (2014) Political parties, motivated reasoning, and public opinion formation. Political Psychology 35(S1):129156. Advances in Political Psychology Series.Google Scholar
Liberman, N. & Trope, Y. (2008) The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science 322(5905):1201–205. doi: 10.1126/science.1161958.Google Scholar
Lillard, A. S. (1997) Other folks' theories of mind and behavior. Psychological Science 8(4):268–74.Google Scholar
Loewenstein, G. & O'Donoghue, T. (2004) Animal spirits: Affective and deliberative processes in economic behavior. Working Paper, Carnegie Mellon University. Posted online on May 4, 2004. doi. 10.2139/ssrn.539843. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=539843 Or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.539843.Google Scholar
Malle, B. F. & Knobe, J. (1997) The folk concept of intentionality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 33(2):101–21.Google Scholar
McCauley, R. N. (1996) Explanatory pluralism and the coevolution of theories in science. In: The Churchlands and their critics, ed. McCauley, R. N., pp. 1747. Blackwell.Google Scholar
McCauley, R. N. & Bechtel, W. (2001) Explanatory pluralism and heuristic identity theory. Theory and Psychology 11(6):736–60.Google Scholar
Mesoudi, A. (2007) A Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can promote an evolutionary synthesis for the social sciences. Biological Theory 2(3):263–75.Google Scholar
Munger, M. C. (2015) Choosing in groups: Analytical politics revisited. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Noë, R. & Hammerstein, P. (1994) Biological markets: Supply and demand determine the effect of partner choice in cooperation, mutualism and mating. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 35(1):111. doi: 10.1007/bf00167053.Google Scholar
Onishi, K. H. & Baillargeon, R. (2005) Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science 308(5719):255.Google Scholar
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Perner, J., Leekam, S. R. & Wimmer, H. (1987) Three-year-olds' difficulty with false belief. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 5:125–37.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B. (2015) Evolutionary political psychology: On the origin and structure of heuristics and biases in politics. Political Psychology 36 (Suppl 1):4578. doi: 10.1111/pops.12237.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B. (2018) Reproductive interests and dimensions of political ideology. Evolution and Human Behavior 39(2):203211.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B. & Aarøe, L. (2015) Birth weight and social trust in adulthood: Evidence for early calibration of social cognition. Psychological Science 26(11):1681–92. doi: 10.1177/0956797615595622.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B., Aarøe, L., Jensen, N. H. & Curry, O. (2014) Social welfare and the psychology of food sharing: Short-term hunger increases support for social welfare. Political Psychology 35(6):757–73. doi: 10.1111/pops.12062.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B., Giessing, A. & Nielsen, J. (2015) Physiological responses and partisan bias: Beyond self-reported measures of party identification. PLoS ONE 10(5):e0126922.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B., Skov, M., Serritzlew, S. & Ramsøy, T. (2013) Motivated reasoning and political parties: Evidence for increased processing in the face of party cues. Political Behavior 35(4):831–54.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B., Sznycer, D., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (2012) Who deserves help? Evolutionary psychology, social emotions, and public opinion about welfare. Political Psychology 33(3):395418.Google Scholar
Pietraszewski, D. (2016) How the mind sees coalitional and group conflict: The evolutionary invariances of n-person conflict dynamics. Evolution and Human Behavior 37(6):470–80. doi: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.04.006.Google Scholar
Pietraszewski, D., Curry, O. S., Petersen, M. B., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (2015) Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system. Cognition 140:2439. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.007.Google Scholar
Price, M. E. (2005) Punitive sentiment among the Shuar and in industrialized societies: Cross-cultural similarities. Evolution and Human Behavior 26(3):279–87. doi: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.009.Google Scholar
Price, M. E., Kang, J., Dunn, J. & Hopkins, S. (2011) Muscularity and attractiveness as predictors of human egalitarianism. Personality and Individual Differences 50(5):636–40.Google Scholar
Reiss, J. (2012) The explanation paradox. Journal of Economic Methodology 19(1):4362.Google Scholar
Roberts, S. O. & Gelman, S. A. (2016) Can White children grow up to be Black? Children's reasoning about the stability of emotion and race. Developmental Psychology 52(6):887–93.Google Scholar
Robson, A. J. (2001) The biological basis of economic behavior. Journal of Economic Literature 39(1):1133.Google Scholar
Ross, D. (2005) Economic theory and cognitive science: Microexplanation. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Schelling, T. C. (1971) Dynamic models of segregation. Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1:143–86.Google Scholar
Simon, H. A. (1982) Models of bounded rationality. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1996) Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992) The psychological foundations of culture. In: The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, ed. Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J., pp. 19136. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1996) Friendship and the banker's paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for altruism. In: Evolution of social behaviour patterns in primates and man, ed. Runciman, W. G. & Smith, J. M., pp. 119–43. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2010) Groups in mind: The coalitional roots of war and morality. In: Human morality and sociality: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives, ed. Høgh-Olesen, H., pp. 191234. Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Weeden, J. & Kurzban, R. (2014) The hidden agenda of the political mind: How self-interest shapes our opinions and why we won't admit it. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wood, G. E. (2002) Fifty economic fallacies exposed. Institute of Economic Affairs.Google Scholar