Intro
My research concern, starting from my dissertation, has been to figure out a decent model of the human actor--how people make decisions and how they strategically interact.”
- Herbert Gintis in an interview for the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Herbert Gintis is a Harvard educated economist who studies behavioral science through a sociobiological lens. In other words, he attempts to understand human behavior not using a behavioral model from any one discipline, but instead by combining these models in an interdisciplinary approach, which he believes is necessary for the accurate representation of human decision-making. His research interests range from altruism and cooperation to game theory and gene-culture coevolution, and he has made significant contributions to the literature. Gintis’ innovative theories have major implications for the future of behavioral science. If put into practice, they could reshape the way human behavior is researched and, by extension, how it is understood.
The behavioral sciences include economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and political science, as well as biology insofar as it deals with animal and human behavior. These disciplines have distinct research foci, but they include four conflicting models of decision-making and strategic interaction … The four are the psychological, the sociological, the biological, and the economic. … These four models are not only different, which is to be expected given their distinct explanatory goals, but incompatible. This means, of course, that at least three of the four are certainly incorrect, and I will argue that in fact all four are flawed, but can be modified to produce a unified framework for modeling choice and strategic interaction for all of the behavioral sciences
– Herbert Gintis in “Five Principles for the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences”
