Herbert Gintis
Reshaping the study of human behaviour
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”
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
