1/7/2008
Tom Tyler, Department of Psychology, NYU
The Psychology of Cooperation
The social sciences have recently been dominated by an image of the person that emanates from economic theory. That image is of a rational actor whose primary motivation is to enhance their self-interest by maximizing material and physical rewards and minimizing similar types of costs. In the past several decades there have been major advances in the field of judgment and decision making. Those advances focus upon the many shortcuts, heuristics, biases in people's judgments and choices and the many outright errors that people make in their efforts to pursue their self-interest in social settings. It pays less attention to the question of expanding models that consider what people value, instead often implicitly assuming that the primary issue is material gains and losses. I focus on the issue of what people value. My argument is that, while incentives and sanctions matter, the traditional economic approach places too much emphasis on issues of material/physical gain and loss. In social settings people are also motivated by a number of other, more social, motivations. While these motivations are increasingly being recognized and studied, the widespread use of experimental methods for that research obscures the importance of social motivations. We have a great deal to gain from expanding our conceptions of human nature to recognize the importance that such social motivations play in shaping people's behavior in groups, organizations, and societies. I particularly focus on the issue of motivating cooperative behavior. |
