The Politics of Human Behavior
The function of politics is to control human behavior. Since control requires some form of knowledge, all political decisions are rooted in some understanding of human behavior. But how can we understand human behavior and what kinds of knowledge do we want to dominate the political landscape?
Four Ways to Learn About Human Behavior
1. Personal Experience
We know about the specifics of human behavior because we behave as humans and interact with other humans every day. Our life experience gives us an understanding of what motivates people and how they tend to behave in certain situations. Part of this is common sense; part of it is wisdom. Personal experience is vital for social skills and for every profession that involves face-to-face contact.
The problem with personal experience is that the knowledge it yields is biased by how we perceive and reflect on human behavior, and it is limited to the sample of people we personally interact with, which might not be representative of greater populations.
We like to derive general patterns of human behavior from our personal experience, from intellectual conversations with others, and from the study of history. If we deem these patterns to be universal, we call them human nature. A classic statement is “Humans are naturally social” or “Humans are inherently [selfish, constructive, destructive, empathetic, violent, or whatever one’s philosophy suggests].” Philosophy is vital for thinkers who gain pleasure from pondering abstract principles and for artists who like to express these principles creatively in their painting, writing, and filmmaking (watch, e.g., movies by Ingmar Bergman).
The problems with philosophy concerning human nature are that it rests on armchair reasoning and that it usually links to ideology. A better understanding of universal human behavior comes from the scientific study of human ethology, which grounds human nature in evolutionary principles (read my blog posts on sex and tribalism).
We can learn about human behavior when we study human emotion, motivation, cognition, and volition within a scientific framework. This includes psychologists, who investigate all these things, psychiatrists, who investigate pathological behaviors, neuroscientists, who study how the nervous system produces behavor, endocrinologists, who study how hormones modulate behavior, cognitive scientists, who investigate the mechanisms of decision making, and behavioral economists, who investigate decision making in financial contexts. Psychological knowledge of human behavior is vital for entrepreneurs, equity analysts, investors, and anybody involved in high-stake decision making (read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman).
The problem with psychology and related disciplines is that the predominantly lab-based experiments, not to speak of self-report studies, only involve individuals or small groups. While this is not a problem per se, it becomes a problem when psychological findings, often combined with philosophy/ideology, unduly motivate political decisions (policymaking). On the one hand, ‘nudging’ choice architects may positively influence people’s well-being (read Nudge by R. H. Thaler & C. R. Sunstein). On the other hand, most well-intended (or self-congratulatory) projects of social engineers turn out to be gross failures (read The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell), and these failures cannot be identified on the small-scale level of psychology.
4. Sociology & Economics
On a large scale, we can study human behavior through the quantitative methods of sociology and economics. They give us insights about how humans behave not as individuals but as societies. Humans are members of classes, communities, cultures, and civilizations, and their behavior on these higher levels of analysis cannot be sufficiently predicted by psychological findings—just like individual behavior cannot be sufficiently predicted by neurological analyses.1 Sociologists and economists produce evidence that is vital for political decision making, be it as a politician or as a voting citizen (read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell).
The problem with sociology and economics is that we usually disregard these fields in favor of the other three types of understanding human behavior, which leads us to make political decisions based on our personal experiences, our philosophical/ideological conception of human nature, and our knowledge of psychological facts. All these kinds of knowledge are valuable to an extent, but the prevailing source of guidance should always match the level of analysis: if we want to know what’s best for a human being, we shall study psychology (without forgetting the underlying biological drives); if we want to know what’s best for a human society, we shall study sociology and economics (without forgetting the underlying evolutionary ecology).
This is why I oppose political equality and advocate knowledge-weighted voting, based on referendum-related tests that inquire voters’ knowledge about sociological and economic facts to determine the power of their vote. At the same time, I realize that the implementation of such a political system would itself become a factor in socioeconomic analysis, and we should treat it accordingly. That is, if direct-democratic knowledge-weighted voting were to produce poor objective outcomes on societal well-being, we want to test an alternative system.
Finally, I want you to consider how none of this requires moralizing or moral theorizing. Abstract values and ethical principles don’t matter. What matters is how the world works: what people factually want and how they factually behave.
- Sure, in theory, sociological processes are functions of psychological processes, which are functions of neurobiological processes, which are functions of chemical processes, which are functions of quantum processes, but every layer of analysis adds a level of complexity that refuses reduction to a lower layer.