We are not born selfish by Friederika Habermann, 12/31/2024

We are not born selfish

By Friederike Habermann
[This article posted on 12/31/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839428351-005.]

The woman is writing a letter, but then her pen falls to the floor. She bends over the desk and tries to reach for it, but can’t. Then the little boy realizes he can help her. He goes to the pen, picks it up, and hands it to the woman. This is an experiment with 20-month-old children: In the first phase, almost all of them are helpful toward adults who drop objects and seem to be trying in vain to pick them up again. The children are then randomly divided into three groups: in the first group, the adult does not respond to the child’s help; in the second group, the adult praises the child; and in the third group, the adult rewards the child with a toy. The result: while the children in the first and second groups continue to help as a matter of course, the children in the third group are mostly only willing to help if they are rewarded for doing so (Warneken/Tomasello 2008). “The scene is touching,” begins philosopher Richard David Precht in his book Die Kunst, kein Egoist zu sein (The Art of Not Being an Egoist) in his chapter “What Money Does to Morals.” He is referring to a very similar experiment with 14-month-old children who help adults open a cupboard door (Precht 2010: 314ff). Anyone who is interested can watch these experiments by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig on the internet. 1 However, the experiment with the third group of children is not included, and to be honest, I would not want to see it. It would be too sad for me. In an article entitled “The Gummy Bear Effect” about “monetary incentives for employees,” the following “debacle, long known to science,” can be found on the Internet on the “Platform for Innovation Culture”: “At a children’s birthday party, tell an exciting story about pirates, dragons, and sunken treasure. Then let the children draw pictures to go with the story. The children will rush to the paper and passionately draw pirate coves, sea monsters, and detailed fleets of pirate ships. Now vary the experiment and introduce an incentive system

Chapter I — Commons.

A paradigm shift

40. For each finished picture, the child receives a gummy bear. At first, enthusiasm is high, but suddenly two types of children become apparent: the artistic personalities continue to work on their artworks with the same zeal and accept the reward as a positive side effect. The entrepreneurial personalities, on the other hand, embark on mass production: According to the motto “dot, dot, comma, dash – and the moon face is finished,” the pictures are produced more and more sloppily and quickly. As a sign of their success, the entrepreneurial personalities pile up gummy bears in front of them. The artistic personalities, completely absorbed in their pictures, notice the mountains of gummy bears of their colleagues out of the corner of their eyes and slowly but surely lose interest in the details of their works […] . The final phase of the experiment follows: the rules of the game are changed again, explaining that the gummy bears have been used up. Suddenly, not only the entrepreneurs but also the artists lose their motivation. The introduction and abolition of an incentive system has turned a highly motivated bunch of rascals into a bad-tempered mob.” Two experiments with adults yielded similar results. Economist Uri Gneezy noticed that at his three-year-old daughter’s kindergarten, the introduction of a penalty fee for parents who picked up their children late in the afternoon did not produce the desired result. He and his colleague Aldo Rustichini in Haifa, Israel, then checked how many parents were late at ten other kindergartens. A fine of ten shekels (about two euros) was then introduced for delays of ten minutes or more. The result: on average, more than twice as many parents were now arriving late. And even after the fine was abolished, the situation remained the same. What had previously been a social quality—not keeping the caregiver waiting—was now degraded to a quantity that stimulated even less of a sense of responsibility. The fact that “being late” was then ‘free’ again may have seemed like a special offer to parents (Gneezy/Rustichini 2000).

Precht speaks of the “strange power of money”: it destroys in us “the sense of […] individual qualities, of the rare and fleeting, of the moment, of closeness, and so on. Everything sounds colorless and indifferent where money calls the shots. Life appears completely objectified—so much so that everything except money loses its meaning” (Precht 2010: 319). Cooperation games conducted by economists with adults also initially contradict the image of Homo economicus underlying their discipline, which is always focused on personal gain; instead, they testify to a tendency to behave fairly – but only until the first egoist appears (cf. Precht 2010: 394f). 3 . It comes as no surprise that when compared with other students, the study 2 | See: http://www.die-erfinder.com/innovationskultur/der-gummibarchen-effekt– monetare-anreize-sind-fuer-mitarbeiter-nicht-alles (accessed on 16 August 2011) (Spelling errors in the quotation have been corrected). 3 | Precht refers here to experiments by Ernst Fehr.

Friederike Habermann — We are not born selfish

41 economics are the first to abandon cooperation in such game situations and adopt uncooperative strategies: Homo economicus is what they learn every day. We all participate in the largest experiment of this kind: the modern monetary economy. It, too, is based on the image of Homo economicus. The Duden dictionary of foreign words (2005) describes this as “a person guided exclusively by considerations of economic expediency.” It also occasionally refers to “modern man par excellence” — because, as mentioned above, reducing life to utility, selfishness, and competition is what we all learn every day. In his book Homo economicus, economist Gebhard Kirchgässner defends this concept as “not so unsympathetic,” since it behaves just as “disinterestedly reasonable” as the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who saw the man who had fallen among thieves and passed by: As long as he has no special relationship with his “neighbor,” it means nothing to him whether the neighbor is doing well or badly (Kirchgässner 2000: 47). This, he argues, is the advantage of modern economic theory: “It starts from a realistic view of human nature and […] does not claim that people become ‘better’ under different conditions” (ibid.: 27). Precht comes to a different conclusion: “Strict and harsh utility calculations, ruthlessness, and greed are not the main driving forces of human beings, but the result of deliberate breeding. This process could be called ‘the origin of selfishness through capitalist selective breeding’, in reference to Charles Darwin’s famous magnum opus” (Precht 2010: 394).

For over two decades, feminists have been discussing a poststructuralist approach that attempts to theoretically grasp the fact that humans are interwoven with their social context, as well as the fact that humans themselves constantly construct and change this context. Therefore, our bodies and (co-)feelings are only conceivable in conjunction with everything that shapes us; yet we are more than a blank slate that is passively described by social discourse (Habermann 2008). Certainly, we are not autonomously thinking and feeling individuals, but rather part of our society with our entire being. But where should empathy come from if not from us humans? Findings in epigenetics show how our biology, including our genes, cannot be understood without considering the respective environmental influences. Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté emphasizes that no one can be separated from the environment in which they grow up. The genetic argument alone allows us to avoid questioning social, political, or economic conditions by invoking a fundamental and unchangeable human nature. Accordingly, our competition-oriented society is subject to the myth that humans are inherently competitive, individualistic, and self-serving.

On the contrary, however, human nature can only be discussed in one respect, and that is the existence of certain human needs: “As humans, we have a need for society and close contact; to be loved, to belong, to be accepted for who we are. When this need is met, we develop into compassionate and cooperative people who are open to empathy and cooperation.

A Paradigm Shift

42 When this need is met, we develop into compassionate and cooperative people who have empathy for others.” 4 In our society, however, the opposite is often observed—which leads to other character traits. Without assuming these to be essential and ahistorical, post-structuralist feminism also assumes that such needs, if they remain unfulfilled, are reflected in the psyche of a subject as melancholy. Hanna Meißner speaks of a “loss that cannot be mourned because it is not even recognized as a loss, since the lost or excluded life option is not even conceivable as a possible option within the framework of the symbolic order” (Meißner 2008: 30). What this means for the search for a happier society is obvious. Every time it is claimed that there can be no better society and no economic model based less on selfishness because “that’s just the way people are,” we can respond, with Richard David Precht, “We are not born selfish, we are made that way” (Precht 2010: 316). According to Precht, the realization that material rewards corrupt character is deeply disturbing. After all, our entire economic system is based on such bartering. And if economics is the continuation of ethics by other means, as claimed by economist Karl Homann, among others, what kind of ethics is it that causes tens of thousands of people to starve every day? Those who did not have enough to offer in exchange. The question is therefore how people can escape this strange power of money without a “major critique of our entire economic system,” which Precht also describes as illusory.

Social psychologist Harald Welzer is right to describe so-called “realpolitik” as “politics of illusion” when we see how much people turn a blind eye to the extent of global social catastrophes. In this respect, only utopian politics is realistic: “The fetishization and sacralization of growth and such fundamentally pseudo-concepts from the past lead to illusory realities—just as realpolitik is really only the creation of an illusion of a status quo that no longer exists. In other words, what is realpolitik at the moment is illusion politics, and what is utopianism is realism—because utopian action or a utopian maxim for action are realistic insofar as they assume that we simply cannot continue as we are now, and that there must be a fundamental change, and not a change […] in the context of existing practices, but rather what we need is a change in the framework itself, in the practices themselves.” 5 4 | Quote from the film “Zeitgeist – Moving Forward” (2011); see: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=AQNktvqGkkQ (accessed on 19 August 2011). 5 | Harald Welzer at the Utopia Conference 2009; see: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Ov-gnuj3wY8&feature=related (accessed on August 16, 2011).

Friederike Habermann — We are not born selfish

43 Welzer responds to Precht’s question about social and ecological radical renewal through democratic means with a plea for change in “cultural practice” — which must be understood as political. 6 Similarly, feminists, among others, have for decades been locating starting points for a different economic system in the “dissident practices” (Carola Möller) of everyday life. This does not mean that other political spheres are meaningless, but changing our daily practices in a way that also changes the framework of these practices forms an essential basis: Once we understand that we humans exist only in interwoven connection with our environment, we also understand that new horizons of thought and action can only arise in interaction with a changed environment, i.e., with a changed material and economic everyday life. “Society shapes us significantly,” says Robert Maurice Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University.

Different societies—individualistic and collectivist—produce very different people with different ways of thinking. And he warns: in a world where advancement is the goal, where people define themselves as part of different classes, as in today’s capitalism, they have few peers with whom they can form reciprocal, equal relationships. But this leads to less altruism. 7 The English term for “equals” used by Sapolsky is “peers.” Harvard professor Yochai Benkler calls the way in which free software is created “commons-based peer production”—a phenomenon that the theory based on homo economicus is unable to explain. 8 It was only in the aftermath of my book Halbinseln gegen den Strom. Anders leben und wirtschaften (2009) about alternative economic approaches in German-speaking countries did it become clear to me that these are basically the same principles that can be gleaned from recent initiatives. To put it a little less awkwardly, I refer to this as “ecommony,” but Sapolsky’s idea makes me wonder whether “peer” is too important to be left out. For these principles give rise to – and this is the crucial point – “structural communality” (Stefan Meretz), which promotes cooperation instead of competition and opens up other opportunities for people to develop. 9 These “peninsulas” are spaces (actually territorial or simply social) in which people create a different reality for themselves to a certain extent and try out where it might lead. They are spaces that enable people to 6 | Ibid., Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS3Eck7c-3Q&feature=related (accessed on 16 August 2011). 7 | “Zeitgeist Moving Forward,” op. cit. 8 | Compare also the contributions by Christian Siefkes and Michel Bauwens/Franco Iacomella in this book (editor’s note). . 9 | Especially since an examination of power relations—whether sexist, racist, or otherwise—reveals that they always imply and presuppose the construction of the “non-equal,” the “other”; cf. Habermann 2008.

Friederike Habermann is an economist and a historian with a PhD in political science. She works as an independent scientist and is the author of seven monographs. In her work, she focuses on the interdependency of economics and the economy with classist, racist, sexist, and other privileges—as well as on ways out of this mess….