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Choice, habit and evolution

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Abstract

Several leading mainstream economists including Gary Becker have treated habit as serially correlated behaviour resulting from deliberate choices. This approach puts choice before habit but involves assumptions of extensive memory and decision-making capacity. By contrast, earlier authors such as William James, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen saw deliberation and choice as a contingent outcome of habits, where the latter are defined in terms of acquired dispositions rather than overt behaviour. The approach of this second group is more consistent with an evolutionary perspective and the limited computational capacities of the human brain.

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Notes

  1. The author is grateful to an anonymous referee and participants at an Erfurt workshop on ‘Automaticity in Judgement and Decision Making’, 28 February–1 March 2008, for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

  2. In contrast, in a early paper Becker (1962) regarded rationality and habit as rival but similarly competent explanations of economic phenomena: habit was not explained in terms of rationality. After his meta-preference function appeared in later writings its intended ontological status remained unclear. Becker might follow Milton Friedman (1953) in proposing that the only scientific test of such a function is whether it makes ‘correct predictions’. This leaves unanswered the vital question of what viable neural and psychological mechanisms actually underlie preferences or choice.

  3. Of course, limited human computational capacity was a key issue raised by Herbert Simon (1957). Ironically, despite their overall focus on the concept of scarcity, neoclassical economists are led by their stress on rationality to overlook scarce mental capacities. For a long while, the adoption of Robbin’s (1932) strictures and Friedman’s (1953) ‘as if’ methodology diverted economists from consideration of the neural and psychological realities underpinning preferences. Fortunately, economists are now paying more attention to psychology (Rabin 1998).

  4. The tide of opinion became so strong that many who claimed to be disciples of Veblen—notably Clarence Ayres (1921a, b)—eschewed the concept of instinct for the social sciences. Such views of instinct remained so influential for so long that even Hayek (1988, pp. 16–17), who increasingly adopted ideas from biology, believed that a ‘gradual replacement of innate responses by learnt rules increasingly distinguished man from other animals’ and typically regarded instincts as ‘atavistic’, ‘ferocious’ or ‘beastly’.

  5. Nevertheless, Libet (2004) argues that his experimental evidence is consistent with free will, which can intervene to block actions already foreshadowed in brain processes. Whether free will is consistent with the fact that our will is itself caused is an old philosophical controversy. To a large degree it depends on what precisely is meant by ‘free will’ (Dennett 1984).

  6. See Bunge (1980), Stich (1983), Churchland (1984, 1986, 1989), Damasio (1994), Rosenberg (1995, 1998), Kilpinen (2000).

  7. By contrast, some economists see choice as an ‘uncaused cause’ (Shackle 1976) or uphold a view of human agency as ‘free of external causes’ (Minkler 2008, p. 21). For a critique of such claims of ‘uncaused causes’ see Hodgson (2004, pp. 61–2, 87–9).

  8. Figure 2 neglects the important proposal by evolutionary psychologists Cosmides and Tooby (1994a, b) that the brain is not an all-purpose calculator but segmented or ‘modularized’. Incorporation of this insight would require significant further development and complication of the figure.

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  1. The Business School, University of Hertfordshire, De Havilland Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, AL10 9AB, UK

    Geoffrey M. Hodgson

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Hodgson, G.M. Choice, habit and evolution. J Evol Econ 20, 1–18 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-009-0134-z

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