Is it Rational to be a Sociopath?

from Asad Zaman

Microeconomics textbooks present the infamous “homo economicus” as an ideal of rational behavior. Those who study actual human behavior – in many different disciplines – have come up with overwhelming empirical evidence that we, homo sapiens, fail to live up to this ideal in many different ways. Unlike the homo economicus, we are not

1. Cold: we let our emotions influence our behavior.
2. Callous: concern for others causes us to share our good fortune with others, instead of keeping everything for ourselves.
3. Cruel: We feel pain for the suffering of others, and sorrow for the extinction of species, or destruction of their habitat, instead of joy at the resulting profits.
4. Calculating: We are not concerned with maximizing our monetary gains, down to the last penny.

The paper “The Empirical Evidence Against Neoclassical Utility Theory: A Review of the Literature” shows how each of these human failings causes us to deviate from the lofty standards of ideal rational behavior. The fact that all four of these characteristics are pejoratives in common parlance suggests that economists’ view of “rationality” does not agree with ordinary language usage of this word. Since the meaning of the word is contested, let us use E-rationality to denote what economists mean by rationality. In ordinary language, we would say that E-rational behavior is sociopathic. This is the framework for the question of the title: is it rational to be a sociopath, as economists claim?  read more