Homo Empathicus — Why Care?
At an obscure laboratory in Parma, Italy in the 1990s, scientists were using MRI brain scans on monkeys to observe their mental activity as they tried to open a nut. Just as this experiment was underway, a man walked into the laboratory and grabbed a nut, and cracked it open too.
When the scientists looked at the MRI brain scan, they saw that the same exact neurons were lighting up in his brain when he observed the human opening the nut as when the monkey opened the nut.
The scientists had no idea what was going on and assumed the MRI machine had malfunctioned. They subsequently proceeded to use MRI brain scanning devices on other primates, particularly chimps, who have a larger neocortex than humans and discovered that we are all soft wired with something called ‘mirror neurons’. It meant that if I’m watching you, your anger, frustration, sense of rejection, joy, or whatever it is — and I can feel what you’re doing, the same neurons light up in me as if I’m having that experience myself.
Now, this isn’t all that unusual. We know if a spider goes up someone’s arm and I’m observing it going up I’m going to get a creepy feeling. We take this for granted, but we’re actually attuned to experiencing another’s plight as if we’re experiencing it ourselves.
Mirror neurons were the object of a slew of studies in neuropsychology, brain research, and child development that suggest we’re inclined to sociability, attachment, affection, and companionship, not aggression and violence and self-interest and utilitarianism.
On 12th January 2010, a devastating earthquake hit Haiti. Approximately 150,000 people died. By 22nd Jan 2020, about US$531 million in aid had been raised with the support of Twitter and other social media tools, said Jeremy Rifken in a presentation at the Royal Society of Arts in London. Within hours following the earthquake, the entire human race came to Haiti’s help in an empathic hug. The response to Haiti could not be explained if we were materialistic, self-interested, utilitarian, and pleasure-seeking, as the enlightened philosophers stated. Humans were clearly irrational, self-sacrificing, and generous, and not entirely self-serving and selfish as the Rational Choice theory suggests.
In his book ‘Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason,’ Justin E.H. Smith argues that human beings are hardly rational, and in fact, irrationality has defined much of human life and history. It also has a potentially severe adverse effect. He writes that the desire to impose rationality, to make people or societies more rational, “mutates. . .into dramatic eruptions of irrationality.” The assumption that human beings are separated from other animals by their ability to reason, which dates back to Aristotle, is fundamentally false.
“I place a lot of good things under the heading of “irrationality” — not just dreams, but also drunkenness, stonedness, artistic creation, listening to stories by the campfire, enjoyment of music and dancing, all kinds of orgiastic revelry, mass events like concerts and sports matches, and so on,” Smith says, and “I think most people would agree that these things make life worth living and it’s impossibly difficult to live without them.” It’s all about controlling it rather than repressing it or, conversely, allowing it to run amok.
In terms of biochemistry, people with eating disorders are barely distinguishable from drug addictions, according to addiction scientists. You can tell someone to stop using heroin, but what can you say to someone who is hooked to food? In this sense, irrationality resembles food more than illicit narcotics. You can’t completely remove it, but if you’re bingeing, you clearly have a problem and should seek help.
The phrase “economic man” was coined in the 19th century at the same time the scientific might of the industrial revolution was astonishing Europe’s intellectual community. The industrial revolution’s power, as well as the rise of steam engines, factory floors, and other machines, led to a hypothesis: What if entire economies worked like machines as well?
The subject of economics was dominated by mathematical equations from that point onwards. Economic thinkers of the day did everything they could to104 make economics a scientific discipline comparable to engineering and physics. They accomplished this by converting everything into arithmetic — nice, tidy formulae that fit perfectly into perfect models.
However, there was one difficulty. Human behavior is far too complex and difficult to model. People make decisions for a variety of reasons that are not based on logic (always have and always will). This tended to muddle the economists’ elegant equation; they dropped the study of human behavior in favor of complex formulae that terrify and yet impress people.
Economists advanced the concept of homo economicus even further in the early twentieth century with something called “rational choice theory,” which argues that all economic actions are first and foremost perfectly logical.
In practise, this meant presuming that whenever a human being makes an economic decision, the individual assesses all available facts piece by piece… then does a risk-reward /cost-benefit calculation. . .and then acts perfectly rationally in order to “maximise” his best option.
It may seem ludicrous, yet this is the mindset that has reigned for more than a century without any resistance. That is, until the 1970s, when the groundbreaking work by Kahneman and Tversky exposing the myriad ways in which human behavior is inherently illogical blew the myth of “Rational Economic Man” out for good.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky ushered in the era of “Behavioural Economics,” which studies the effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the economic decisions of individuals and institutions and how those decisions vary from those implied by classical theory.
The work of Kahneman and Tversky, and their path of economic thought, is relevant to us for two reasons.
First, because these biases and flaws are founded on the way the brain functions, Kahneman and Tversky revealed useful and universal facts about human behaviour — the “cognitive biases” and habits of erroneous thinking that all people possess.
Second, the ghost of the “Rational Economic Man” still lives, in the sense that there is still a widespread belief that humans are naturally rational and logical, despite the fact that they are not.
Humans are predisposed to be overconfident in their decision-making abilities, an evolutionary characteristic that allows us to make judgments quickly and easily, avoiding the stopping, life-threatening paralysis that would occur if we were constantly doubting ourselves. As a result, it’s difficult for people to accept that their tastes can be anything but consistent and coherent and despite all of the experimental evidence to the contrary, rational agent theory remains a cornerstone of microeconomic theory, underlying many of our society’s policies.
