The vast majority of us are not “Homo economicus”.

Quite

SelfAwarePatterns

Often, when I write about moral instincts, people respond with assertions that we’re essentially selfish creatures and that nothing about morality is natural.  There’s a name for this concept of the solely self serving  human being, “Homo economicus.”  The Neuroskeptic discusses a study that looked for them:  Spotted at last: “Homo economicus”? – Neuroskeptic | DiscoverMagazine.com.

Are we selfish?

Economists like to say that, to a first approximation, we are. In other words, that we tend to seek to maximize our own rewards, in a more or less rational manner.

The trouble is that this theory (at least, a straightforward interpretation of it) doesn’t describe how people behave in many situations. For example, given a sum of money and asked to decide how to split it between themselves and an anonymous stranger, most people choose to give some of it away. This scenario is called the Dictator Game…

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~ by Sable Aradia on August 5, 2014.