Evolutionary rationality and the limits of traditional thinking

Herbert Simon once pointed out that theorists of human behavior tend to go to extremes in their interpretations of rationality: economists tend to exaggerate the capabilities of the human mind, and psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists tend to downplay them, emphasizing the role of motivations, emotions and culture (Simon 1957, pp. 1-2):

“Traditional economic theory postulates an ‘economic man,’ who, in the course of being ‘economic’ is also ‘rational.’ This man is assumed to have knowledge of the relevant aspects of his environment which, if not absolutely complete, is at least impressively clear and voluminous. He is assumed also to have a well-organized and stable system of preferences, and a skill in computation that enables him to calculate, for the alternative courses of action that are available to him, which of these will permit him to reach the highest attainable point on his preference scale” (Simon 1957, p. 241).

An example of extreme rationalism is the theory of Graham Snooks. Snooks believes that the basis of economic development is not to be found on the side of “supply” or culture, but exclusively on the side of “demand” or the subject. He argues against basing economic theory on the concept of “evolution” that the new institutionalists borrow from biology, noting that “economists seek assistance from other deductive disciplines rather than from history” (Snooks 1997, p. 5). Instead, according to Snooks, economic theory should be based on the concept of “dynamic strategy”:

“At its center is materialist man who, in a competitive world characterized by scarce resources, attempts to maximize the probability of survival and prosperity. To do so, the strategist pursues one of the four timeless dynamic strategies: family multiplication (involving procreation and migration to new lands), conquest, commerce, and technological change” (Snooks 1997, p. 6).

Choosing a strategy is a rational action that involves imitating successful people and their practices. Snooks considers the “intellectual ability” of strategists to be the most limited resource (Snooks 1997, pp. 52-53). Unlike cultural evolution theorists, he believes that individuals are capable of “inventing” the necessary solutions. Accordingly, he considers cultural evolution to be the result, not the driving force, of social development (Snooks 1997, p. 68). He derives changes in institutions and economic growth from the demand of strategists and competition among their groups, and considers cultural change to be the sum of institutional change and economic growth. He distinguishes between “strategists” or innovators (profit seekers), “non-strategists” or followers, and “anti-strategists” or rent seekers (Snooks 1997, p. 63). Snooks reduces human motives to material consumption and culture to a vague collection of “everything that contributes to the complex structure of human civilization” (Snooks 1997, p. 68). He does not seem to understand that “strategies” are elements of culture, that strategists develop culture and thus develop themselves in the process of mutual imitation. The third thesis about Feuerbach fully applies to Snooks’ point of view:

“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 5, p. 4).

Herbert Simon noted that people are not omniscient and cannot solve all problems with reason alone, and introduced the principle of bounded rationality:

“The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality” (Simon 1957, p. 198).

What could be the cause of the limitations of the mind? Thinking combines instincts, practices and reason, which are developed to varying degrees by natural and cultural selection. Actions based on instincts and the consistent learning of many generations of people are performed faster and more easily than actions that have emerged relatively recently or require reasoning. Daniel Kahneman calls fast intuitive thinking System 1, and the slow conscious thinking System 2. System 1 is associative, metaphorical, deterministic thinking that comes easily and is automatic, and System 2 is probabilistic statistical thinking that requires a lot of reasoning and reflection. Humans strive to reduce problems to what they supposedly know, to automatic associative and causal correlations. The limitations of reason and our deviations from rationality are explained not by instincts or emotions interfering with reason, but by the mechanism of thinking itself, in which reason is only a later, albeit important, element. This prevents us from recognizing “a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in” (Kahneman 2011, pp. 13-14).

According to Ken Binmore, rationality is not determined by the ability of humans to foresee the consequences of their actions, but by whether these actions enable humans to reproduce themselves:

“Even when people haven’t thought everything out in advance, it doesn’t follow that they are necessarily behaving irrationally. Game theory has had some notable successes in explaining the behavior of spiders and fish, neither of which can be said to think at all. Such mindless animals end up behaving as though they were rational, because rivals whose genes programmed them to behave irrationally are now extinct. Similarly, companies aren’t always run by great intellects, but the market is often just as ruthless as Nature in eliminating the unfit from the scene” (Binmore 2007, p. 2).

In this case, we are dealing with the other extreme, the opposite of Snooks’ views: an individual need not be rational, a population is rational. Populations can make mistakes and still evolve, but individuals do not evolve: unlike populations, individuals are mortal. One extreme exalts reason, reduces all of history to the results of free choices, and does not recognize the evolution of strategies. The other extreme reduces reason to consistent activity: individuals simply follow programs to maximize utility, and evolution selects the most successful programs.

The limitations of thinking are no cause to deny people their ability to make choices, although instincts and practices that have fused together over hundreds of thousands and millions of years are a set of powerful programs that people follow. Human thinking is a combination of selection and choice, of strategy and reason. “The mixing of custom and choice at any one time produces, almost tautologically, the existing culture” (Jones 2006, p. 261).

Like biological evolution, the evolution of meaning does not seek the “best” or “maximum” solution; it only seeks the “sufficient,” “minimum” solution. This applies equally to making, communicating, and thinking. Evolutionary rationality is not based on utility and its maximization, but on preferences and propensities that allow us to choose a necessary and sufficient option. Moreover, utility is only one of the types of meanings between which a person chooses—along with morals, dreams, ideals and other meanings that are not always ordered among themselves. People’s needs and thinking are shaped by culture-society, and people behave rationally not only when they maximize utility, but also when they strive to comply with norms—that is, with the socio-cultural programs they have internalized:

“Rational conduct means that man, in face of the fact that he cannot satisfy all his impulses, desires, and appetites, foregoes the satisfaction of those which he considers less urgent. In order not to endanger the working of social cooperation man is forced to abstain from satisfying those desires whose satisfaction would hinder the establishment of societal institutions” (Mises 2005, p. 163).

Evolutionary rationality does not assume that reason is limited, but rather that reason and choice play different roles at different stages of socio-cultural and personal development. A child’s mind begins with an uncritical perception of another person’s actions, but as it matures, critical ability develops. The human brain and intelligence did not evolve to choose, but to persuade others, but now we try to use reason to make decisions:

“In what is already recognized as a major advance, in The Enigma of Reason Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber show that reason itself has evolved for the strategic purpose of persuading others, not to improve our own decision-taking. Motivated reasoning is why we developed the capacity to reason, and how we normally use it. Yet more fundamentally, the massive brain expansion of the past two million years has been driven by the need for sociality” (Collier 2018, p. 35).

Traditional choice accelerated the progress of meanings compared to cultural selection. Nevertheless, it still was constrained by customs, traditions, and other practices transmitted through cultural learning. Cultural evolution increased the sophistication of reason and enabled people to solve complex problems. However, in the race against uncertainty, the complexity of problems also grew. At the limits of traditional thinking, customs and other practices became an obstacle to cultural evolution. Simple self-reproduction ended when meanings proved to be an obstacle to their own growth and culture-society found ways to overcome this obstacle.