In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely
across many fields--including economics, psychology, anthropology,
sociology, moral philosophy, and biology--to provide a rigorous
transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics
of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can
be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis
argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify
the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical
framework--one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution,
the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At
the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich
possibilities of such transdisciplinary work. Everything
distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the
fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society
itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we
affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our
species because the rules do not change through inexorable
macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the
rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior
that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules
of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is
essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People
generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules,
and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies
that lack laws, government, and jails. Throughout the book, Gintis
shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences
that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.
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