Exploitation with Hannes Rusch
2025-11-25 13:00:00.000 +00:00

Hi Dave. I'm the Pinsof. You are the Petrazuwski, and this is uh what is it? It's uh EP the pod. Evolutionary psychology the podcast, actual evolutionary psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists enjoying David, today we have a wonderful guest, Dr. Hannes Rush. I think he has a couple PhDs uh actually. I think he's this guy is dripping with PhDs. Just a brilliant, a brilliant mind. Um fantastic scholar scholar in Germany at one of the Mox Planks. Um and we get into exploitation and group identities. Really beautiful insights into exploitation, I think. And it changed the way I think about it. It made it so much more precise. Um, really great insights onto what you know exploitation is, how we can go about measuring

it. We what else do we get into? Uh where exploitation might be and whether or not people are aware of it. We also get into heroism. Uh we get into group identities, and uh man, we just yeah, it was just a lovely uh conversation about super important topics. And the thing I love about it the most is that Hannes is such a clear thinker and he was talking about things that basically haven't been touched on that are super, super important, right? Yeah, no, he takes uh seemingly airy abstract ideas like exploitation, uh tribalism, heroism, and he distills them into a uh into precision that is so crisp and mathematical and beautiful that it just it's uh it's a delight to yeah. We also talked about people being groupie, like in as an individual difference, which is I

think super cool. Uh the idea of somebody's like groupie, like they like being part of a group or intergroup dominance. Yeah. Yes. Well, after listening to this episode, I think you will be a groupie for evolutionary psychology of the podcast. Nail that. Enjoy. Today we have uh Hannes Rush. Uh that is, yeah. Can you say it, Hannes? Can you do it? Rush. Yeah. I did it well. You did it, you did it much better than me. Yeah. My son says I speak funny German. Um so um too. We have uh a Dr. Hannes Rush, who is a um both a tenured faculty, um how do you say Maastricht University? That was almost perfect, Maastricht. Ah, schön. Okay, Maastricht. Okay. And um and then, but you also are an independent group leader at

Freiburg in um in the Max Planck for um Institute for the Study of Crime Security and Law, which is the overarching institute, correct? Um no, so the the Max-Planck Society has lots of institutes, around 80 or so worldwide. This is just one of them. No, exactly, but that institute that you're at, the name of it is the uh study prime. Uh correct. Correct. So we've yeah, because we've had like um we've had Annie Wirtson, uh we just had Brett Beheim, who is at the MPI EVA in Leipzig? And uh I feel like every time we have a Mox Planck person on, we sort of need some explanation for people who are more at a standard, more university system. Um and so the Mox Planck you're at, there's a several uh permanent directors

who are all somehow involved in the study of crime security and law. Is that right? okay so we have three departments each department has a director and the departments are one is for criminology this is also uh where my group is attached then we have one department for public law and one department for criminal law that sounds like a wonderful environment i mean maybe you can tell us about maybe as we have this conversation today about sort of what that's like working in a building with people who are united in that sort of sense. Um, and then uh, but you are an independent research group leader. Um, and the name of your group is the um uh behavioral economics of crime and conflict. Is that right?

Yeah, super interesting. Um, and I was and I've been looking at this, and there's two projects. One is basically um exploitation, So human, I love this man unkind is the name of this project. Um, and it's basically just sort of, you know, laying out um uh and then Hannes, I'll let you speak in a second. But it's just laying, I just love this so much. Like it's laying out um this histories of humans exploiting one another to varying degrees of organization, including up to like slavery or more mundane things. Humanity's greatest hits. Yeah, exact exactly. Yes. Uh we are we are wonderful as a species. And then um and then another is uh how do you say this other name? This disc grid is this or what disgrid, yeah.

But basically um, you know, there's so much that's uh driven by social identities. And so why do these levels uh high-level social identities, things like you know, ethnic ethnicity or race continue to exist and sort of what's pushing that around? Um that's just so cool that you're studying both of those things. Um and I I yeah, so um that's great. And um let's start by uh where where do you want to start, Hannes or David? Let's let's get into it. Maybe let me just give you a spoiler in advance so that the name Man Unkind that you like so much is actually borrowed from a Metallica song. Nice. Fantastic. Well we will we if we had more editing time, we would cut to that song right now, but maybe

we can put it in the show notes. So why why is why is man un unkind? Other than that it you know it sounds cool in a a metallica song. So I I listened so in in preparation for for talking to you today, I actually listened to the episode that you recorded just recently with Pat Barkley and he's also very much into the evolution of cooperation, right? And this is also where my interest in evolutionary psychology started of sorts, right? Maybe a bit earlier, but I did a lot of work on evolution of cooperation and was always fascinated by this. But then at some point, I was thinking, okay, this literature is very well developed. So can I really make any fundamental contributions there anymore? Probably not.

So what else is there? And then you suddenly turn to the not so nice features of human nature, right? So the dark sides of human behavior, as we usually call it in describing what the group does. And one of them is exploitation. I mean, I've been working on intergroup conflict also a lot. This is maybe well, it's a very dark side. Um, but if you go to to a little more subtle, a little milder forms of um of evil behavior, then you then you quite quickly arrive at slavery and um all different types of exploitative institutions and behaviors than humans can um can develop and can show. And so I had a look into the literature trying to figure out if there had been any systematic work on the evolution of exploitation, if you like, in humans.

And I was astonished to find that there really is not much. Um and so I wrote a I wrote a grant proposal and luckily got it funded. And so I'm I'm now have the freedom to study this super interesting topic for five years on funding. That's fantastic. I I I'm very curious. So you're you're a a game theorist, a mathematician. I'm curious what you what you think exploitation is? Because it seems like a kind of fuzzy abstract concept, and I'm sure you have a crisp formal definition of it. And I'd love to hear what it is so that it can blow my mind. So, how do you how are you thinking of this phenomenon? So I think one one this is this is just career strategically, it's nice that the term exploitation has been used by Marx and is actually quite central

in in Marx's philosophy of society, if you like. And so I think this has scared a lot of people away from looking into the underlying behavior, right? Because they didn't want to be associated with Marx. And I also, I mean, I'm I I read what he wrote about this and I find it interesting, but certainly not super correct. So um I thought, well, why not give it like 150 years later or so to give it another try to understand what the underlying behaviors are and really start investigating those with the modern methods of behavioral science that we have. And in that process, and also for the grant proposal, of course, I was always asked to define what exploitation is. Like you just asked me to. But my standard response to this is actually: I don't want to define it so precisely,

because it's, in my view, it's a range, it's a full spectrum of different types of behavior that you can see. Some are very mild in the degree of exploitation that they um that they include, and some are super exploitative, like slavery, like chattel slavery, even um, so that is maybe the one of the worst forms. If you if you go into philosophy, for example, go into um the the um Stanford Encyclopedia and have a look how they define exploitation. If you want a like a formula, what you often get then is it's taking unfair advantage of someone else. But this is not a good definition because it just reduces the problem to defining what fairness is. And I mean you have 2,000 years of philosophy that are not able to come

up with the one definition of what we're supposed to consider as fair. So you get into the same issues when you when you um talk about exploitation. So what I'm trying to do is rather to have a look around and say, okay, we we probably all agree that slavery is exploitative. So what is it that people are doing there and why are they doing it? So try to get rid of the of the analytical philosophy, if you like, of having to very clearly define what everything means, but rather look at behavior and understand the behavior. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. It's taking a clear example of something and then just unpacking it in terms of and Johannes, you can tell me or tell us sort of what your approach has been.

Because it sounds like this is how new is this, or how far along are you into this project? Um the project oh good question. It's running for almost three years now. So we have two years left. Okay, so you're kind of right in the middle of it. So, how do you approach this study of that? So you mentioned how you because it seems like a very large, overwhelming thing, especially if people haven't been studying it before. So, can you tell us a little bit about um you talked about how you approached the concept of it, but now how do you empirically investigate this? Or what are you doing with your students? So maybe before I get to that, let me briefly advertise a book chapter that we recently wrote because it's I think it's never true that something has not been studied at all,

right? So we're facing 2,000 years of science essentially as as the um as the result or as the insights that we are working from. So we we try to summarize everything that is out there on exploitation, especially in terms of theory on exploitation, um, in a chapter that is called um exploitation theory and practice. That is great. Forthcoming in the handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics. Maybe we can also we'll put that in the show notes or or even a link to it if uh yeah. Yeah, we it's also open openly available from uh from Krim Archive, I think actually. Great. Okay, so um that is where where interested readers can or interested listeners can read up on the on the knowledge that is already out there.

But what we are doing is the project or the is built on three pillars. And one is just do clear microeconomic theory or the do the game theory of exploitative relations between people and also so one-on-one, one-on-one, n on n um kind of relations. That is the theory pillar. Then we have the experimental pillar where we ascend where we try to design behavioral experiments like the standard economic experiments that you know. Um, that model situations in which one side can exploit the other. And then we see what people really do and how they perceive it, and maybe which type of people go which way. And then the third arm is the applied microarm, as I call it, but you can also think of it as the archive data arm.

So we are having a look around for essentially all available data sources out there that allow us to get an idea of historical forms of exploitation, but also contemporary forms of exploitation. And then we apply the methods of applied microeconomics, so causal inference statistics, trying to get at um what's what has happened in these historical cases, or several cases, if possible, of course. So how are how are you so you you mentioned that you're you're mathematically formalizing this and you're and you're studying it from the theoretical level. I'm curious like how you are formalizing this. What is an example of like an exploitative situation where person A exploits person B? So what we had in mind when we started modeling, and at least one of the modeling

approaches we took is really um a slavery-like relationship. So assume you're the master, I'm the slave. Then what you want to do is you want to prevent me from running away, right? So you want me to stay with you. So what we give you as a means is you can reduce my chances, you can invest a little bit, so it costs you a little bit, but you can by investing a little bit reduce my chances of successfully leaving the interaction with you. So you can, and we would consider this one behavior that um that creates a situation of dependency which the other party is not voluntarily entering, right? So you're tying the person to you against their will. And then you can use this situation, for example, to um well,

you can you can a mild form of exploitation under these circumstances would be that you then um lower the wage that you pay the person for their work. Right? The the logic is simply if you don't work for me, you have bad outside options, and I made your outside options bad, but yeah, I'm sorry for that. That was rational from my perspective. I did that, so now you work for me at a lower wage. Or under under worse conditions. So exploitation, the way you're thinking of it, is when an actor pays a cost to constrain the outside options of the recipient in order that the actor can uh increase the benefits that they are reaping from the interaction and and uh increasing the costs that the recipient incurs from the interaction.

Yes. So that's that's this one form how we operationalize it for one of the experiments or two of the designs or paradigms that we are developing. But essentially that's it, yes. Interesting. Is there is there a another paradigm that that that you have? Well the one this one this one is we are working on developing the second one. This one is a bit too complicated to explain to people for online experiments. We realized right. So this is research. We we try to make it as simple as possible, but um still we we are aiming to use this one for laboratory experiments and play it repeatedly with people so that they can really get a feeling for how this interaction structure works and um can converge on the

type of behavior that they really want to show, which might be difficult in a one-shot or con like um strategy method type online experimental setting. and the other one that we're developing now is is an even reduced version of this where um where you where we make choices super easy to understand and um the consequences super easy to understand and um limit like the the action space for for both parties but still try to maintain the exploitative act aspect of what the principle mainly we call him the principle so the person in the stronger role the master in the relationship um how they can um well it's interesting i'm i'm seeing uh a a uh an interesting parallel to abusive relationships so um if i'm in an abusive relationship with someone one tactic i might use

to get them to stay with me is i might insult them lower their self-esteem uh perhaps deceptively to make them think that their outside options are are more constrained than they actually are that no one other than me would actually be with them Or if they uh you know talk to anyone else or or even you know mildly flirt with anyone else, I might, you know, inflict extreme either physical or psychological costs on them. So I'm both deterring them from pursuing outside options and tr and d deceiving them into thinking that they have outside options so that they'll stay with me and that I will reap a a greater benefit from from the relationship. Um And that they're uh and that they will incur a higher cost from being in that in that

relationship than they would otherwise incur if they had an accurate uh understanding of their outside options or if they actually had uh uh viable outside options. Um and and and that would be, I guess, moving a little bit further along the continuum from extreme to to mild. Um and I'm trying to think of other situations. I mean, you you could you could even think of just you know bad mouthing your social competitors as as something that's you know on the mild on the really mild end of the continuum just spreading negative gossip uh about someone say if you're competing with them for you know a promotion or a job um that's a kind of way of reducing the outside options of of other people um and it's doing it deceptively Um uh it's not quite the same as you

know threatening violence to reduce the outside options, but it's a it's a different way of reducing outside options via deception. Do you think that uh that kind of behavior belongs on the continuum? Yes, definitely yes. So sorry, go ahead, Hannes and we have a theory paper out also very recently um where we where we define or for the model there, we use three components, which in that particular setting are the actions that the exploitative party or the exploiter can use. And that is luring someone into the interaction through deception. So I can promise you love and and happiness forever, but once you marry me, I'm gonna push you very hard. So that could be in that application, could be one thing.

Then that I confine you. So I make it hard for you to leave me. And I extract labor or any other benefits from you using force. So punishment. Yeah. And three these three together, um, they in that setting they define what the exploiter can do. So that's the extra action space of the exploiter. And then we try to mathematically model and understand the conditions under which it's rational or optimal for the exploiter to use which means to which degree. And that in economics we then call that comparative statics. So that gives us some predictions for what rational exploiters would be doing under certain circumstances. It it occurs to me that um an interesting aspect of your model is that the victim of the

exploitation does not have to be aware of the fact that they're being exploited necessarily. All that needs to happen within them is that their space of outside options contracts. Right? And they don't need to be aware that it has been externally contracted by the exploiter. Um if they believe the deception, then from their perspective, they could be making a rational choice. All that matters is the objective outside options in in actual reality are contracted uh and that the exploiter is reaping a benefit from that. Yeah. What would it what would it oh sorry, David, go ahead. And it is often, I mean, presumably in some in many cases, it is cheaper um for the exploiter to uh exploit via deception than via threats of of violence um

if they can if they can pull it off you know if if there's a plausible um lie they can tell uh because then they don't you know they have to pay lower monitoring costs you know they have to you know incur you know fewer risks from attacking someone it's it's often in the exploiter's interest to achieve their goals through deception than through uh violence. Yep. So when you look into the data on human trafficking, um, for example, which is one of the data sources that we that we're trying to use, um, then you see um that victims have been systematically surveyed on how they ended up in these kinds of relationships. And one of the one of the um means by used by exploiters that is very often mentioned

in like half of the cases, for example, it depends on the database and of course how you how you ask the question, but um it is in in in 50% of the cases um in in one particular um source of data on calls to a to a human trafficking hotline in the US, for example, 50% of the interviewed victims say they have been tricked into or deceived into this relationship with a um with the exploiter in the beginning. And then the relationship started degrading, right? So then, and this is exactly so the logic behind that from an economic perspective is just like you say, it's much cheaper for the exploiter to first try deception. If that works, fine. If it doesn't, then you start using harsher means like violence or confinement.

And what is the minimal cost thing then? Can you follow that along? So that's trickery at the beginning. The relationship degrades. What is the path of least resistance, or what's the the intelligence of the exploiter doing there? Um, right. So it's still cheaper. Like can you talk, yeah, can you kind of walk us through that? Oh um we haven't so the the model that we currently have actually abstracts away from this entire process. Yeah. So we're just saying we're just looking really at the outcome and we're s summarizing everything into uh a cost term for the three different types of behaviors that the expert can show and then we say okay if deception is cheaper than do using force, you're gonna see

more deception than force, etc. Right. So for that model, um, we try to keep things very simple. Yeah, you have to start somewhere, yeah. I mean, yeah, just give me money for a second five years and then I will run this. It's it's incredibly cool. It's so great that you're doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool stuff. I mean, I uh it occurs to me that another interesting parallel is in the economic sphere. You could think of a monopoly uh as exploitative. It's it's doing exactly the same thing that, you know, uh to a to a more limited degree, the same thing that the abusive partner is doing, the the slaveholder is doing. What they're doing is they're they're uh constraining uh outside options so that you're

forced to transact with the monopoly, uh and so that the monopoly can, you know, charge higher prices and extract uh uh more benefit from from the relationship. Uh so that uh have you thought about the the economic side of this as well? Um I mean we've we've had a look around the economic literature. What you're referring to now is essentially using the theory of labor markets or different types of settings within uh not labor markets, but markets in general, right? So if one if one side is reduced to one agent, like the monopolist or a few agents, the oligopolist, then you have similar structures. And so the theory that has been developed there is informative for us. But what we're particularly interested in is also so usually the market

literature and economics assumes that there's an institutional framework in which agents act, and this is usually governed by law. And so the monopolist and the oligopolist are a little constrained in what they can do. And what we are doing is we're like crossing the boundary to criminology, if you like, or to law and economics by saying, what if the exploiters or the potential exploiters don't care about the law? Right? If they just say, okay, if I violate the legal framework or if I go against the rules, I might have to pay an additional extra cost if I'm caught, but it might be worth it, right? So let's try it. And this is essentially what we're adding there as a as a contribution by by saying, okay,

let's just think of completely unconstrained agents on the strong side. Yeah. I love how what you did is you took an example of an important phenomenon, uh, abstracted it away. And what David's doing right now, and I'm doing too, and I think a lot of listeners are, is then turning around and saying, given how you've abstracted it, where where in other where else in life do we see this? And yeah, it's starting to feel like everything, just about, you know, like government, uh, policy, um, your jobs. We talked about jobs an episode or two ago, um, where there can be constraints uh in your options, the detection of exploitation, what would that mean from the perspective of the exploited? Um, like is there detection of exploitation when, for example, um I

realize that my options are being curtailed um artificially? Or like that's also seems like a s a tricky thing. Um so we are working on this, right? We have ongoing projects that try to look into exactly this. And but we started with a project which is close to be written up, where we simply surveyed people in the US, um, a representative um sample and asked them, have you ever been exploited in your professional career? Yes, no. Have so, and 70% of the people said yes. So then we asked them, okay, what exactly happened? Who was the person exploiting you and what did the situation look like? And then we got qualitative responses from them and we're still working on coding these in a systematic way.

Um, so you can think of it like it's an experienced sampling kind of um approach. But what we also ask them to do is I don't know how familiar you are with this, but there's this situational interdependence um scale and framework. So that's essentially the idea behind it is let's try to come up with a framework that um like captures all dimensions on which situations that we perceive can differ. Okay, so it's I mean it's not my research, we're just using it, but uh I like the idea, right? So that you say, okay, people probably run around with a with a framework that helps them make sense of the situations that they are in, is in particular in um social interactions. And so the social then they came up with a couple of dimensions along which

um um social interactions typically differ. And we used it and asked people, okay, in this situation, for example, um how high was the degree of future inter future interdependence between yourself and the other person? So, or and several kinds of these questions. And so we're trying, we used it to try to get an understanding of what the prototypical situations look like in which people feel exploited. And then we ask you unpack what this this this notion of future interdependence or what is what does that mean? Um it think of it as repeated play. Okay. Right? So if if we play a one-shot dictator game, so if you're a random stranger on the subway in New York, I'm probably not gonna see you again.

But um if you're David Pinzov and uh I you might end up my referee in some in some journal publication or so there's a chance that our uh interaction that started today will somehow continue. And so um our degree of future interdependence is a bit higher than for a random stranger in New York subway. Right. And for like a boss it would be very high. Like the person who's your boss every day and you come into work next day and the next day and the next day. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So we have future. So how does that factor into uh exploitation? So we what we asked them, what we asked participants, so we have now we have a set of situations where people said, okay, I was exploited in this situation.

Or I felt better, let's say I felt exploited in this situation. Um and then we asked them, okay, what would need to happen? How would the situation need to change in order you in order for you to not feel exploited anymore? So they described a situation where the factors that made them feel exploited are removed. And then we asked them to rate this new situation again on the sit on this SIS on the scale. And then we can compare essentially what do people think how the situation would need to change in order for them to not feel exploited anymore. And then we took their responses. So a couple of couple of the dimensions actually showed up as significant there. But then we also wanted to get at causality, right?

So what we have here is just how people think of those situations and what they think would need to change. But then we, in a third study of that paper, we turned this into a third-party observer kind of situation, and we described or we developed simple scenarios where we said, okay, here's a boss, here's an employee, the boss did this to the employee. Please rate the situation on the using the scale and tell us how strongly you think that the boss exploited the employee. And the the main thing actually that shows up there is that if people feel that that the weak party is completely under the control of the strong party, that's the strongest predictor for um feelings or or feelings of own feelings of um exploitation but also of third party observer ratings of okay, this boss

is clearly uh uh exploiting this employee. But so in in the end you can say it it boils down or at least um the the main, the the strongest predictor there objectively is asymmetry of power and the stronger party making use of this power to extract something from the weak party, which is perfectly in line with the Stanford encyclopedia definition, right? So it's maybe not the biggest oh it's maybe not the biggest discovery, but it's nice to see that okay, if you if you really systematically look into how people perceive this, then you get this preside empirically back. But your way of thinking of it has a little is a little more nuanced than that, and that the power asymmetry in part derives from the exploitation itself.

Right? So if I'm can so if I'm a monopolist and I and you have no other options but to buy from me, then I and and and maybe I've done that because I've I've you know any any competitor to mine I've sabotaged in some way, then I've created that power asymmetry. The exploitation itself has has bought me that power asymmetry. Um and uh uh and in addition, once I have that power asymmetry, I'm going to use it to further the exploitation, to further constrain your outside options, to to sabotage any competitors that might arise. Um and so uh it's not it's not merely that so the the power asymmetry is sort of baked into the model of of exploitation itself, right? In this particular so again, in this particular study, yes, but in general, no.

So we would so we need to start somewhere with the with the vignettes, for example, that we are showing participants there, and there we don't tell them a story about how this boss became to be the boss and how the employee became to be the employee. We just started with the power asymmetry. But in a more general approach or in a general modeling approach, for example, the one that we are taking in the theory project I talked about earlier, there we would it add an additional stage where the stronger party can really increase its strength before making use of the dependence situation that it created or so. But technically so I I would I would completely agree with you that technically oh it's an interesting question.

I I I we haven't really systematically maybe looked into this yet. Is is exploitation also possible between perfectly symmetrical partners? And so maybe this is a limiting case where like the the scope for exploitation vanishes. I mean I don't know. It will also probably depend on how you model it. But well, there I mean you could it's it seems like you could get that with deception. Deception would be the only means available for for equally powerful individuals to exploit each other. I could just lie to you and say that your outside options don't exist. And if you believe me, then I get to exploit you now. Um but if there's no power asymmetry, then I can't, you know, physically threaten you or

threaten you with with job loss or or threaten you with some some cost because that would itself be a power asymmetry. But if there's but if I can't threaten you in any way, then the only thing I really can do is lie to you. Yeah. What what do you think about uh the relationship between exploitation and cheating? Because that seems like a neighboring issue. That's an example. Because I'm also thinking of Lita's. We we should have Lita on uh uh soon enough. Um but Lita's cheater detection work, because Hannes, what you were just describing reminded me of some of that cheater detection work. It was an employee, an employer, and it was showing that they the the bringing it back to the evolved software, there's detection of cheating, and it's

really role dependent. So if you're from the perspective of the employee, there's certain behaviors that the employer might do. So for example, like you might have worked for a while, but did the employer actually give you the like the retirement benefits you're entitled to? But if you're coming from the employer's perspective, it's a very different set of behaviors. Like, did the employee um like do what they needed to do? And are they getting paid too much? And so, um, so yeah, so one question is: what's the relationship between, let me just start with, yeah, what's the relationship between cheating and exploitation? Is it is is cheating an example of an equal relationship that involves exploitation?

Or because like what's that deception? Is that I mean, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe that's like a definitional question, but what's your what's your take on cheating? So when we think back to the theory project, cheating is definitely part of the picture, right? So deception can be one means to get people into a relationship with you, or maybe make them even work on promised conditions which turn out not to be true. But if you don't have any additional power asymmetry or means for the stronger side to limit the options of the weaker side, then you just have a market like where where a free market where if I don't like the interaction with you, I could go to someone else and say, Well, Dave lied to me, so I'm not gonna go now.

I'm gonna go to David and see if he has better conditions. I see. So that you would have different dynamics, right? Because one just quick follow-up then is related to that, and this is again based on the cheater detection work, is that from an evolved psychological perspective, there should be quote unquote biases in these systems, right? So if I'm exp if I'm in the role of exploiting somebody, all else equal, my evolved psychology should take advantage of that, but not frame it as exploitation, right? I'm just doing what's in my interest and what's my family's interest. But if I on the conversely, I should be very ultra vigilant for being put in the perspective of being exploited. And so that sort of bias or error management idea of, and you you were

mentioning that you're, you know, telling people a third party perspective, which might be more objective. Have you started to look into or thought about those those biases. Yes. So um that's ongoing work, but we we also have one or we have several projects actually trying to understand the justifications, maybe like um overtly, but also maybe also just um undercover, so to say, um, that exploiters might be using to explain to themselves and to others why they are taking unfair advantage of the weaker party. Right. So and why it's justified that they do this. You will in in normal circumstances, you will hardly ever get people to say to open the admit and say, well, yeah, I was the employer, this person was undereducated, so I gave

them shitty conditions and they work for me. So it's their own fault, right? But this this already is is a justification strategy, right? So that you say, oh, I just made use of their low degree of education to have them work under conditions which smarter people wouldn't have accepted. So it's their fault. Right. But the the moral question there is so the moral question there is, is it really their fault? Is this behavior by the employer okay? Is it not? I mean it's it's also what you see economists might it it's it's difficult to well, I mean I I shouldn't be generalizing to all economists anyway. Um, but you have this discussion, for example, in the context of the gender pay gap, right? So some people might say, yeah, if one group is just not good enough at bargaining for

higher wages, it's their own fault. Structurally, they might have the same power of leaving conditions they don't like and being in high demand if they're qualified on the labor market. If they don't leverage the power they have, it's their own fault if we underpay them. I I just put this on the table, right? So we could discuss about this forever. Well that this is an inter this this brings me to this is an interesting distinction because uh on the one hand, so if if I have actively constrained uh my partner's outside options and I'm using and and you know because of that that allows me to uh extract benefits from them um then that's a clear case of exploitation but what about in cases where I have not constrained the outside options at all, the partners' outside options have

already been constrained before I've even entered the picture. So let's say you know there's there's a person that I'd like to hire and they have very few uh marketable skills, they can't really get a job anywhere else. Uh, really, I'm the only uh person who would be willing to hire them. Uh and because you know I've correctly seen that their outside options are low and that they they can't really work anywhere else, and you know, you know, whatever I give them, they'll they'd be lucky to get, I give them a low salary. Would would in that condition would that count as exploitation, even though I have not constrained them? You're asking me to like draw a clear line and say, okay, this is exploitative, this is

not, but I won't do that, right? Because all I can tell you it's a spectrum. And where you draw exactly the line, this depends on your ethical views, on your political background, maybe, on your own experiences, whatever, right? On what the legislative framework that you're exposed to is actually saying. So this is also not what we are really interested in the project, where exactly this definitional boundary is, because it varies across countries, it varies across political ideologies, it varies across time. So maybe an interesting project might be to explain at some point, but this has probably been done under under different labels, um, would be to look at okay, what pushes the definitional boundary more to this side and more to this side, right?

So but this is going into debate about okay, inequality, the emergence of inequality and all these kinds of things. So political science, I would suspect, has probably as I say, under different labels, maybe, but done a lot of research on this. So I think that we cannot contribute much, maybe. But I think that answer is the contribution, right? Like that, it's a different perspective. So, like, you know, if I'm looking at a low-wage worker, um, but I am the employer, I might not think I'm being exploitative because, you know, like the cons as David said, the constraints already exist. But then from an outside perspective, somebody who's really concerned about that person's welfare, they might just run the counterfactual of, well, if there were institutions that

gave them outside options that I can easily imagine, then they wouldn't have to be in that difficult job. And so it's just that again, it comes back to like this evolved psychology of bias where depending on the perspective you take, it's exactly right, Hannes, there's no objective definition of exploitation, but it's that every individual has strategically sort of has a position towards am I the locus of exploitation or is exploitation even happening um at all? So I do feel like you do have a lot to contribute in that. That's what you're basically bringing to the table. I want to get into um collective action for exploitation or a group that uh works together to exploit another group. You know, the history books are littered with examples like this.

Do you think it's possible for a group of humans to collectively exploit another group of humans while the exploitation being common knowledge, overt, and on the surface? We all know that we're just evil people who are exploiting these people, and that's the reason we're doing it. And let's go out and do it. Has that do you see that as a plausible uh pathway for intergroup exploitation to emerge, or do we need some kind of moralistic or religious pretext? Yeah, I was so I also listened to you, I think it's the third episode where you discussed this part, right? So yeah, and I wanted actually to like if I get the chance and now I have the chance, like object a little bit because um My view is more that

ideology follows the incentives. You don't need the ideology if in in the first or as the starting point. But when the incentives are there for one group of people to exploit the others to enslave them to what do whatever atrocities to them, they'll do it and then they'll come up on the spot, maybe, or with a little delay with an ideology that justifies what they are doing to themselves. This is more my view, right? I mean, this is a big philosophical debate. Right. It's it's more of a post hoc. Mind follows matter or the other way around. But I think Marx, Marx has this saying, right? So you could say mind follows matter and would blame philosophers to see it the other way around. Yeah, no, I certainly buy that the post hoc uh aspect of it exists, but I think maybe I can

try to convince you that the pre hawk uh exists as well. Yeah, yeah. No, I I completely agree. I mean, we've developed cultural systems and and all these kinds of ideologies that are pretty useful and just on the spot, not just justifying once you've discovered a new opportunity for exploiting other people, but also even to see new opportunities for exploiting other people, right? So I I completely agree that's an interplay between ideology and incentive. So that's that's going on. Oh yeah. So Hanus, just to clear about what you just said, it's the idea that some ideological communication like by a leader, for example, what is actually being communicated, maybe not verbally, but it everybody is coordinated around, is that I am communicating to you an

opportunity to exploit people in a way that hasn't existed before. That's a really is that what you're saying? Well, what I'm what I'm the way I'm thinking about it is a little bit like we need coordination devices. And you also used this term earlier in in the episode. We need coordination devices to figure out if a sufficient mass of people in our group is willing to like show the behavior that is that we're um that we might be coordinating on. So if if the leader says, okay, there's out group X, they're all idiots, let's take advantage of that. This leader is essentially making a suggestion and checking if there's a sufficient degree of consensus within the group to go along and do it or not.

And then this doesn't need to be so don't think of this democratically, right? So um, but I rather think of this, he may he might just need the three the three strongest people in the in group to carry on. And then he just makes the suggestion if he has a powerful coalition within his group, they're gonna do it. If not, then they're just gonna forget about it, right? So it's also cheap essentially to say, Oh yeah, it was just a suggestion, let's not do it, right? Maybe not the best idea. Yeah. It sounds like a high school or like school, like where kids will pick on kids and then they kind of like see do the other kids go along with it. Yes. And then it's just sort of it's these like exploitation feelers, right?

Where it's sort of like just checking is there common knowledge or coordination or willingness to go on. I re that's super super interesting, super important. Yeah. Well, so much of human If you're interested in in this particular type of behavior, my my co-author and friend Gönl Down, she has a super nice paper with Klaus Abink. Um I think it's called the Mobbing Game. Oh, I'm familiar with this paper. Oh yeah, that's the really good one, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm I'm I'm starting to to work. So basically the mobbing game uh is uh it's just a coordination game and we all have to decide who pays the cost. Is that uh from what I remember, that's that's how the game works. Um and that's another version of the simple majority game, where we play a coordination

game to see you know which subset of us is going to uh receive a benefit and which subset is going to incur a cost. Um and there's shockingly little work on on this game. Uh and I'm starting to to work on a paper exploring some of the, you know, simplest dynamics of it. But I think there's so much insight to be gained um in in in thinking about this. Um we should invite you to our group hangout. Yeah, that would be if you want to yeah if you can pitch the idea to the group please. Yeah I'd love to. D David, the cost would be like the person or both of you. So the cost would be like so like just to make make sure I'm being clear, um, if there's like a bunch of kids on a playground and there's one kid sort of the scapegoat, that's the

cost. And so everyone else is sort of gaining status. Um, or I guess to give it teeth, it's sort of I don't know actually what would the benefit be there that they they actually there's a coordination that if I'm the victim, I might be willing to like give up a toy or resources and it's becoming common knowledge, right? Like to give it to give it evolutionary teeth. It's it's that um if you guys are dominant over me and and you behave in such a way that it's common knowledge to all of us and third parties, and it's sort of a recalibration that like you guys will get stuff from me more or less. Is that sort of yeah yeah basically um you can think about it like Well what's interesting about it is because it's a coordination game, um, focal points are

needed to coordinate. And it explains sort of why the weird kid or the conspicuously different kid is often the one who gets picked on. It's not necessarily that they're that they're they're dumb or or or or incompetent or mean or something like that. It's just that they're visibly different from everyone else, and that helps us coordinate. Um and so what what uh your colleagues found in the mobbing game is that um people rapidly converged on different ways of coordinating. And so they had one condition where there were like, you know, some rich people and some uh and and some conspicuously poor people. And what they found was that people didn't really care. Sometimes they gang up on the rich people, sometimes they gang up on the poor people.

Well, it wasn't really it didn't really matter what the level of wealth was. It wasn't that we had like an animosity toward rich people or poor people. It was just that they were conspicuously different and that helped us coordinate. Uh which which I think is really interesting. Yeah. Um you were gonna say something when I was asking the question. Yeah. Wanted to to add because you were asking for what the material benefits of this type of mobbing behavior are. I think there's also a signaling aspect to this, that it might just be enough to to gang up with two strong guys and push around a third uh weaker guy just to signal to everyone else if you mess with the two of us, that's what you're in for.

Yeah. It doesn't really matter essentially what they immediately get from it, but it's more the signaling deterrence kind of logic that might be playing a roof. And and another kind of mind-bending benefit they might get is to themselves avoid being the targets of a gang of bullies. So this is an interesting uh way I've been modeling this is what what I call the witch hunt game. So let's say we're all certain that one of us is a witch. Um that means at the start of the game, we each have a uh one third probability of being found guilty of witchcraft. And so if Hannes and I form an alliance against Dave and accuse him of witchcraft, we've now increased our payoffs from negative one third to zero.

And so that just that increase to zero is itself our benefit. Right. That's super cool. That also suggests like sensitivity in the design to like a mobbing. Like, are we in a mobbing ecology? And if so, that should really crank up uh conflict because if you're in a low mobbing situation where that doesn't happen often it doesn't benefit you to gang up on people or if it does it's sort of there could be leveling coalitions but if we're all implicitly in a mobbing ecology right where sort of like it's there's no um there's no benefit to to sort of being seen by everybody as sort of magnanimous then it just immediately becomes a thing if I don't gang up on other people then other people will gang up on me.

And whatever cues there are in the environment that that's true should really ratchet up the ganging up or mobbing. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. The more the more paranoid you are about being uh ganged up on, the more willing you should be to gang up on exactly. Yeah, that's about that's a great way to put it. Yeah. Super cool. Amazing. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, we've we've run the gamma. We've we've we've really delved into exploitation in a in a fascinating way that's gonna have me thinking about it for for many weeks. Um but we've gone from exploitation to intergroup exploitation. I guess that's a good segue into intergroup conflict in general. You have an interesting paper called uh the knowns and unknowns of intergroup conflict.

What are what are some of those knowns and unknowns? It's a great title, by the way. This is also borrowed from I think Don Romsfeld or so. Oh yes, of course. There's the known there's the the known unknowns and the unknown knowns. Like you have all four cells or something. Yes, exactly. So I need to like explain the background a little bit. So the paper is written from the more from the angle of economics than from the angle of psychology. Okay. And in economics, a very central model that is being used in order to try to understand why conflict might emerge is the so called bargaining model. The idea there is let's say that there is a big pie we can fight about the pie or we can bargain about the pie.

If we fight about the pie, we waste time, we waste energy. And essentially you can think of that reducing the pie size. So fighting in itself is most of the time very inefficient. It's destroying opportunity um options or it's destroying energy and destroying resources. And in a perfect world, you should always be able to a priori or ex ante negotiate about a split of the pie that prevents this destruction and makes everybody better off than they would be under conflict. Okay. So even if there's uncertainty about you know which side is more formidable? This is the this is where the problems come in, right? So but let's start from the very simple, simple um setting where everybody knows how strong

everybody is, the pie size is known, everything is known, and also bargaining is is perfectly transparent and so on, right? So ideal conditions, then it is under these conditions, it's very frustrating to see why people end up in this irrational, inefficient type of behavior, which is fighting about the pie. Okay, and then you have so we're we're with the knowns now, right? So this is the model that economists often start from, political scientists also. And then they discovered lots of lots of um modifications that you can make to the simple story, which will then allow rational actors who really understand the complete logic of the situation still to end up in this trap of conflict. And one of them is exactly what you pointed to.

One of them is I might not know how strong you are. So I might not be willing, I might underestimate your strength. So I might not be willing in the bargaining process to give you a share which would actually be appropriate. You know this. so you know what kind of share you could essentially be um acquiring if we fought. And so um we won't reach an agre an agreement in bargaining, so we have a bargaining failure, and this is going to cause us to fight. Right? So this is one thing that can happen. There's lots of lots of different modifications to the setup that can explain why even rational people would end up or rational actors, groups would end up fighting. And so in the paper, I give a long or a little overview of mechanisms that have been

studied theoretically and also empirically that might explain why bargaining can fail. And then I give a list essentially of questions where um which I think um are worth thinking about more. One of them is how identity plays a role in here. So this is mainly the view, um, or this this is actually like relating back to what we already discussed. Um, this in this entire literature, the groups have mostly been taken as exogenous, as given, right, and their characteristics. And I know of no good model, for example. I know of one which is good, but it's not fully developed. So um that there's good starting starting work at least, But where you have the situation where a leader would be saying, okay, let's define an outgroup, let's

strategically define an outgroup and see if I can if we can get a strong enough coalition to go into a fight with them, which is essentially worth it for us, right? So which under a under relatively neutral cost-benefit calculations would be worth it. And what you have the a typical setting or a simple simple um result that would come out there is, for example, rich minorities are at high risk, right? Because they are rich, so it really pays to fight against them, to um uh and at the same time um they cannot really defend themselves because they are small. And so that's a simple simple situation where you would um see this kind of emergence of conflict to to like not exploit in this. Trying to model this, but w I would one more layer to this in addition to wealth and small

numbers is um social alienation. Because um if they if the reason why the small group is more wealthy is because they're more productive, then there are uh potential benefits uh from associating with them and cooperating with them, interacting with them. They might share some of those resources with you voluntarily. But if they're socially alienated such that you're never going to get a piece of of those resources anyway, um the only way you can is by ganging up on them. Then in that case that that would be another ingredient that would uh uh instigate conflict. But I would go one step I'm I don't know what your idea of social alienation there is, but I would consider this maybe also as endogenous, right?

So we could inalien alienate them because we know that there's a lot to be get got from gotten from them. And so this could also be part of the picture. Yeah. But that even there might be some cases where it would be cheaper just to buddy up with them and you know and form form a collaborative partnership with them where they, you know, their benefits would, you know, flow to you at least to some degree. And that might be cheaper than violently ganging up on them. But if if there's no share them? Yeah. Yeah. But if they're um but if if that's difficult and and the cheaper option of buddying up with them isn't available, then in that case you might favor the the uh darker option. Aaron Powell This is very interesting because like one of the tropes of uh demagoguery is

that there is a group that has stuff and they're bad actors. And it that really uh sounds a lot like it's killing several birds with one stone because what it's doing is it's sort of articulating there's a numerical minority group that uh has stuff we want. So it's doing this like exploitation feeling out, but it's also sort of painting them as bad actors, which, if accepted by everybody, actually reduces their options, that numerical minority. So if I'm walking around telling Hannes that David is a terrible person and Hannes accepts this, it's not only that we're um we're not only sort of like ganging up on David, but we're also sort of reducing his social options in the sense that we're agreeing on a signal that other people will be like, oh, he's a pariah.

Um and to the degree we have power, you know, just uh then uh even if people would prefer to cooperate with David, but they know that you and I Hannists are going to gang up on David or punish people who cooperate with him, then they're not going to. And so I feel like a lot of quote unquote scapegoating or demagoguery is this is just beautifully capturing this deep structure of of exploitation. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, there's a way that this that coordination can feed on itself. If we've all agreed to coordinate uh against the outgroup, it's kind of hard to break out of that. Um and as soon as a a particular coordination equilibrium gets established, you know, that becomes the path of least resistance for everybody.

And so it could just be that the coordination itself takes on a life of its own and that could be another factor in intergroup conflict, and that we've always it's always been this way, and so it continues to be this way, because anyone who departs from this way is going to face costs. Yes. And by I mean by doing this you also create enemies, right? And they if if you can't wipe them out entirely, so that's the the logic of a genocide, maybe it the genocide idea can be thought through as being just what you need to do in order to really reduce the risk of retaliation by the group that you've attacked to zero. If you really want to make sure that they don't get back to you, you just need to kill them

all. So I I don't think this has happened often historically, and it's interesting to study why, right? But the logic is of course there. You're creating, you're marking the enemy group, and if you leave too many of them alive, then you have an enemy sitting there, right? And they might get support from other groups and they might get back to you later. So Wow. Yeah, I never thought about that twisted logic behind genocide that it really does matter to a you know to an evil rational agent to make sure that they're all gone. Yeah. Um it's a fascinating point. This last thing we started talking about of the dynamics of coordination is leading into um this maybe second part of what you study Hannes, which is group

memberships. um and in this disc grid um project. Can you talk a little bit about that? And sort of because we've talked a lot about exploitation, which is fantastic. I mean, not that people are exploiting it, but it's fantastic that you're studying it. Um, but can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with this? And it sounds like it's about identities, um, or yeah. Yeah, so I mean um it's it's my very small contribution to the as you can could call it the in-group-out group literature, right? Which is it's super huge in in evolutionary psychology, but in psychology more generally also, and since the 2000s also in economics. Um and what I wanted to do, or one of the main projects in the

In the disk grid project is actually trying to replicate and then to look into the possible temporal dynamics of preferences which have been recently discovered, you could say, or um Rachel Cranton and Seth Senders and colleagues, they've suggested that you might be able to classify people into different types where a type defines how they react to group markers. And so the this is this grouping groupiness or groupy behavior, they um they labeled it. I I think for English native speakers, this this name is always like uh feels feels funny for for Germans, it's perfectly fine to say somebody is groupy. But I like the label. The idea is um If I'm strongly not groupy, you can put me into sports teams and say, Hannes, you're now with the

green team, please fight for the green team. I will say, I don't care about the teams. You put me in another group context, which could be Germans against what have you, right? Then I will say, I don't care about nationalities. I'll just be nice to people who I think deserve being that I should be nice to them and uh be nasty towards others. So I don't care about group markers. And what they do, they have a clever experimental design, I think, to distinguish between these types of preferences. And then they see, okay, there's really there seem to be some people who never react to any group markers, any group contexts. And then there are people, and so this is also a spectrum, right? So you have different degrees of how strongly you can react to group markers.

And what they what I think what the cleverest and nicest aspect of their experimental design is they put people into a minimal group context, like the Kleikandinski thing, and they put the same people, so within participant design, put them into a natural group context, which in their paper is um Republicans versus Democrats. But in my replication and like longitudinal extension of the of that paradigm, I couldn't use that because it's I ran the experiment in a in a European context. So what I'm using is actually it's a lab in the field experiment, and one group of participants is police cadets, and the other in their first year, and the other group is economics and business students in their first year.

And so I can compare essentially how they develop over time. The idea was, of course, that it's also interesting to study people who like the police cadets who are exposed to a very strong group identity, right? So they study in uniform, they get sworn in, all these kinds of things. And gradually over time, I ran the Cranton experiment with them three times over the course of the first year, just to look into: okay, does this exposure to such a strong identity change anything? Does it make you does it maybe create more groupy people over time, if you like? And these kinds of all these kinds of things are um I can I can look into these in this kind of setting. The the very interesting thing I found, and this is also the main message of the resulting

paper, is actually, and please correct me and please point me to the papers if I'm overlooking something, but I did not see any papers yet where this would like the minimal in-group or in-group favoritism in minimal group context would ever have been studied longitudinally within participants. So a huge literature, it's a huge omission. Yeah, and this this was really just part of my experimental design. Amazing. Um and so for for the natural group relations there, I used essentially um you are so you are part of students at one university and you are matched for the experiment with students at a foreign university, which was actually true because they were run in two different countries. Um and what I see for both group contexts is that um in group

favoritism is super unstable within persons. So um it's not like I'm I'm favoring my in-group today in six months from now this is relatively almost not predictive of whether I will be doing it um again, right at the second um measurement. And at the third measurement even less so. So um I have like a 0.0 something correlation between wave one in group favoritism and wave three um in group favoritism that's that's fascinating. So um so you're just to clarify, you're talking about say so the minimal group paradigm is you know I like Kandinsky paintings versus Klee paintings and and that is going to put me into the Klee group or the Kandinsky group and it's a totally it's totally arbit arbitrary.

You know uh and uh and by virtue of being in the klee group, I'm going to be nicer to the people in the Klee group than in the Kandinsky group. So what you're saying is if you run that same minimal group paradigm where, you know, first you you put me in the Klee group and see how nice I am to the Klee people versus the Kandinsky people. And then a few months later you run that study again and you put me into the the Klee group versus the Kandinsky group. What you're saying is if I'm really tribal about Klee the first time around. That is basically not going to predict how tribal I'm going to be toward Klee the next time around. Precisely, yes. So I have a question about that, which is so there's some work, it's not at all

longitudinal in this sense, but it's like Rebecca Biegler developmentally, where and if people don't know about this, it's worth looking at, but this sort of like blue eyes, brown eyes experiment that was done by a school teacher. And uh, and it was a situation where you take an arbitrary identity, but then in the classroom, it actually gets used as a basis like by the children, right? Like to sort of like let the experiment run. And so what uh Becca Biegler, Rebecca Biegler found was that to the extent that the arbitrary markers organized social interaction and access to desired things like, you know, turns or resources, the kids would sort of go along with it. Um, so that's not super longitudinal, but in a sense, that's sort of the closest thing.

So that's amazing, Hannas, that you're doing that. One question then for you is is the lack of a correlation does that is that because there's no sense in which the arbitrary groups matter, such that, for example, like let's say in the classroom example, if the if the structure of the world actually tracks the arbitrariness. So it's just say, like, you know, we're the yellows and the blues, and we're all of a sudden in a classroom, and there's actually some social teeth to the yellows and blues, and it starts to be enforced. would in that context do you think individual differences start to um be stable or we don't know that we don't know my my best guess would be so when you so the group relations that I'm using these group contexts are like

you say pretty much meaningless yeah except for the police thing I mean I guess that's a sense in which it's not I mean it's not like as strong as sort of like a very overarching But they they at least they are not that relevant to how people make these social decisions in these like dictator games and stuff. Um and it's also easy for you um to realize okay, they are telling me I'm matched with someone who is, I don't know, studying at another university, but why should I treat them any better or worse? But if you if you you use a group context, so I haven't done this, but there's at least some data out there which might be used to look into this. And I think when you use when you use these kinds of group markers, which have a stable

meaning outside the lab and then repeat the games, then behavior within participants will be much more stable. But I think it will not be like, well, this is pure speculation, right? I we should I think, well, give me another grant that I will study this. Um the I I'm I'm I would be super interested in in understanding whether, okay, there there's different types of people with different degrees of groupiness. If you put some of them into this stable intergroup like hostility kind of setting, they will pick it up and they will start discriminating and do so stably, while other people would still say, no, right? So I don't care about your group context, leave me alone. Um so yeah, so I would be really interested in like independently

determining people's level of groupiness and then put them into this kind of stable political or what have you um context and have them and and look at their behavior there. Yeah. But yeah, it's all a future future one. That's super cool. Yeah. Did you so did did you look longitudinally at the non-minimal groups as well? So like if people were you know tribalist about their their university or their political party, they would also be tribal about it the next time around? And would did you find the same same result or a different result? This is very interesting because one of the main results of Cranton, um Cranton and Sanders and colleagues, I should say, um, is that they only have one day essentially,

right? So they they survey people on one day. And when you do this, then their behavior, their in-group favoritism in the minimal context is correlated to their um in-group favoritism in the natural context. So there's a lot of things that is the main insight. This is also and yeah, what my so I replicate this pattern, right? So in my data, in every wave there's a correlation between the context uh contexts. But it's different people doing the in-group favoritism on different days. So it's like a validation. Yeah. It's like coalitional. Let me let me propose it to them. Coalitional. No, no, no, not not even, but like group. Are you in a coalitional mood today, Dave? How are you feeling? Yeah, no, exactly.

No, that's really nice that it validates the it's sort of like a sanity check, like that the arbitrar the minimal group is sort of tapping the the the software setting that day of the coalitional system. In the paper, I think I say, are you in a groupy state today or are you in a group in an ungroupy state today? Yeah. Um yeah, What do you think about the term coalitional? I mean like Hannes or David. Like, I mean, so groupie tribal, like what's the is it groupy better than coalitional? Like how coalitional is somebody, or like how groupie is somebody? I don't know. What do you guys think? Potato potato. Yeah. We're talking about the same thing, we're just flapping our mouths differently. Yeah.

You know. Yeah. I would I completely agree. There's a famous quote by a German mathematician who who said, Tische Stühle Bierseiter. So it essentially means I don't I don't mind if you call something a desk, a chair, or a glass of beer, as long as you define what you mean in the context, we're good, right? So Yeah. Yeah, totally. Um great. So uh so that that's is that uh so that's the identity or you talked about types of people earlier in the episode, which I thought was really interesting in terms of like locating types. Is that what you were referring to? Like the groupiness or coalitionality, or are you looking at other individual differences too? So the main point of that paper is of course to replicate um

this classification of people into types, groupiness types, and then also look into okay. So the the assumption behind the design was of course or the ambition was to replicate and then to explain who would be groupy versus who would be less groupy. But actually since since it's within person it's not stable, right? So it's it's yeah this part of the research question can't really be answered. Right. So So you can't you can't correlate something that doesn't exist if there's people individual differences. Yeah. So I never I never got the answer. So so there was also no correlation between say university favoritism or political party favoritism from one month to the next? Was that the same result there?

Within contexts, there is no con correlation over time, right? So very low correlation. Over one year there's zero correlation. Wow. Okay. So my if I if I'm really tribal toward my political party, that's not going to predict how tribal I'm going to be a year for a year from now. But I don't have political parties in my experiment, right? But you have universities? I have universities and Kleikandinski. Got it. Okay. So the university is the same result. University is the same result. My suspicion, my my suspicion would be if we rerun this with political parties, especially in a setting like the US, political party would be stable. Yeah, I'd bet that as well. Yeah. But I I would think there this is not to be confused with like

the person being groupy forever. Yeah. But the person just really having bought into for some reason into this intergroup relation and and trying to like enforce this intergroup relation between these two parties. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's really important because uh yeah, uh just uh because I think like traditionally psychology has sort of operated at the level of behavior and just sort of sought to say like our individual differences stable. But I think an evolutionary approach or more sophisticated approach is even when it is, like you said, Hannes, I think it's really important to highlight that it's the result of this software calculating costs and benefits and sort of what am I, what's my um, what's

sort of my role or my strategy now. And so you might even get somebody who is stable for a while, but then sort of sees an opening. It comes back to these like market dynamics of like what are my outside options. And so you might have a very stable politician who's really, really um dedicated to their party. And as David has sort of pointed out, you know, the ideology comes second or even Hannes, as you said it. And so, but then when there's an opening for more status or resource competition comes up, then immediately could just turn on a dime. And there's no inconsistency from the perspective of the underlying software, because it's really looking for social strategic options. I think that's a really important thing to highlight that you just d did nicely, and I just

want to emphasize Hannes. Yeah. I completely agree. Yes. Could could not agree more. I'm tempted to use that study uh as further ammunition in my argument against this idea that uh conservatives are more groupie than liberals. There's a lot of research in social psychology that that suggests that you know conservatives have a groupy personality, and that's why they're more nationalistic or, you know, whatever. You know, Jonathan Height says that they they're higher on the in-group loyalty foundation or whatever. Um, and I have a paper uh critiquing that idea among other ideas as as being implausible, uh, both theoretically and and empirically. Uh and uh I've I have a new a new piece of evidence in favor of that argument that it it's

not even clear whether groupiness even exists as a coherent uh individual difference marker. Yeah. But I think at least in in the minimal groups context. Because um I I also applied um Granton Sand Sanders method to classify people into these types and you and I get a quite similar distribution of types. But this is n and also even the distribution is stable across time, but it's not the same people in the different things. That's so interesting. Yeah. So do you do you have thoughts about I mean, is it literally just like what is the group they're thinking about the day that day? Well, no, they can't be right because you're actually t keeping the group identity constant. It's very puzzling that it's so malleable.

I'm wonder is it they're in a bad mood that day? 'Cause I'm I'm thinking of I'm I'm sure you're familiar with um Michael Bank Peterson's work on Need for Chaos. Uh uh and he finds basically that the people who want to watch the world burn, who literally agree with the statement, I want to watch the world burn on a survey, that these people are more likely to spread hostile rumors and political, politically dubious, you know, what we might call fake news to try to sow chaos and discord. And and and what's interesting is they'll they'll spread fake news even if it's on the left or on the right. Like they don't really care. They just they just want to watch the world burn. They just want to spread stuff and start shit, basically.

Um and I just say need for chaos is what sounds like a Metallica song name or a few years. By getting back to Metallica, yeah. Um and and he finds fascinatingly enough that these people tend to be pretty, you know, low status loner people who might you you might expect to benefit from uh you know uh an overturning of the social order. You know, there's that great quote from Game of Thrones: Chaos is a ladder. Well, if you're at the bottom of the ladder, uh it might be in your interest to sow chaos, because if you if if if the social order is uh is an upheaval, that that might be an opportunity for you to rise uh in status. Uh or at least you have, you know, barely anything to lose. So you might as well, you know, try to roll the dice on on how society is is arranged.

Um, and so maybe it's just fluctuations and like personal, maybe, you know, I got insulted that day and I'm feeling a little insecure about my social status, so I'm gonna be extra groupy that day. But another day, I mean uh I got uh promotion, I got complimented, so I'm not gonna be so groupy. I don't know. Is there any plausibility to that or am I out of my mind? This is essentially the discussion section of the paper, right? So we need to study this. I I have no good idea of when people enter the groupy state and when they don't. Yeah. So this just needs to be studied empirically more. Yeah, it might also be like just coming back to exploitation too. Like some days I feel like I'm exploited by the group identities I am a member of, and some

days I don't, you know, and that just is sort of a fluctuation too. And that might have something to do with it. But yeah. Yeah, indeed. I mean, also with with these in-group-out-group settings, you can have so the in-group is also heterogeneous, right? And if I had a bad experience with an in-group member on a day, I might say, Well, I really don't like being associated with the Germans that much anymore today. So you might just like look for friends in different out groups that day. Yeah, that's super cool. Um one, so we've covered sort of exploitation and um the start of talking about the identity stuff. Is there other work while we while we have you that you would like to sort of cover? Um because I you've you've done so many different things, and I you know I love the

throughput line of sort of being really careful, logical, and sort of um having an economic approach married to an evolutionary psychological approach. I think it's just so cool. And the way you're approaching these difficult real-world phenomena, distilling them down in a way that's captures something, but you can still be kind of quantitative about it. Are there other projects that you think might be worth mentioning? Or maybe also, I mean, people listening, if there's sort of uh uh an ad for sort of like joining projects that might still be ongoing or or even in the future, um but this is very much off topic, but of course I'm now um very interested also in in everything crime, right? So why would somebody be inclined to break rules?

Why would somebody will be willing to take the risks of doing this and so on? So there's been a lot of work in the economics of crime, but also in the um psychology literature and in criminology itself, of course, there's lots of um work being done. So that that's a new interest I have, or relatively recent, but it's still it still fits in well with me being interested in all sorts of dark behaviors that humans can show. Yeah. One thing that we haven't touched upon, and which is a little, I don't know if I should call it a hobby. It was a huge fascination that I always had and which I want to continue a little bit. Currently, I'm just not really actively working on it, is heroism and high-stakes altruism.

because I think in in this domain there's the more and more data is becoming available. And so the the very informative, high quality, applied micro kind of studies that I as I would call them become more and more possible. Um and I think I I I still have this feeling that the theories about altruism that we have developed and the mainly the experimental games, the economic games that we have used to study those don't fully match. And so I'm I'm not co like 100% convinced that you can test a theory about inclusive fitness and how inclusive fitness would be increasing your chances to be an altruist using dictator games of ten dollars. I've done those myself. I'm I think they are a very good methodology.

They are maybe among the best things that we have because we can control for everything. Very nice, but they still leave open this possibility that for high stakes things might be somehow different. Right. Right. And so that's why I'm still very interested in and also following the literature a little bit um on uh work on heroism. Yeah, that's super cool. Defined, yeah, defined defined, sorry, um defined as really like high-stakes altruistic behavior in natural contexts. And so you can define heroism again as a question, how do you define it? And you can you can come up with alternative um uh definitions which allow for everyone to act heroically in social situations. This is not what I mean essentially.

What I mean is really: you're the guy who runs into the burning building to rescue the kid, or you're the soldier who like throws himself on the grenade to protect his comrades. These kinds of naturally occurring high-stakes altruistic behaviors. Yeah. It's interesting you you call them high stakes. That evokes kind of a gambling context. I mean, are you are you are you formalizing this as like kind of a risky altruistic act where like the payoffs could be huge, but also the cost could be huge too, and you're just taking a huge gamble either way. Is that how you're thinking of it? So I think the the costs, the costs are the main aspect. Yeah, the costs are super high. So they reach a level where they really have an impact on your future life.

They might even kill you in in the examples that I gave, right? Yeah. Can also be a little lower. So there's also reach uh research on um what's it called? It's I think undirected organ donations or so that essentially you say, Well, I have a kidney and I'm going to donate it to whoever needs it, and I don't even want to know who this person is. This has an impact on my life, right? So I increase my risks of becoming ill and everything. But it is a very altruistic act which um which has really high or really severe consequences or can have at least it has a high risk of having severe consequences for you. Yeah. I wonder if it's certainly certainly higher than just $10 in a dictator game. I wonder, I mean, it's interesting.

I see kind of a weird twisted parallel between that idea and Ed Hagan's work on suicidality, who we had on the podcast. So his idea there is that if you are um in a conflict with other people uh and you have really low uh bargaining power, um and you're being exploited. I mean, your your work also fits in nicely with his work as well. Um uh you you need some way of credibly signaling that that you that you're in need and you need the terms of the relationship to change. Uh and you also need some way of of bargaining to change your situation. And what he would argue is that a lot of depression and suicidality and self harm, these that these are both are simultaneously bargaining strategies in the same way that, you

know, a a union might go on strike to withhold benefits from the company to get a higher wage. So they're there are simultaneously bargaining strategies and also costly signals and that they're they're they're signaling need in a way that is comes with a true cost. And in some cases, you know, the the cost is risking your life. And so he finds that most suicide attempts are not successful. And so you're you're taking a small risk of death in order to potentially reap the benefit of a renegotiated relationship. And that it seems like a similar logic to your heroism where you're taking a small risk of death to potentially uh receive some other benefit. Maybe it's to rescue someone, maybe it's to to get status or something.

Uh but it seems like the logic is is somewhat similar there. Would you buy that parallel? I'm I'm completely not an expert on uh suicidality. Um from the from the mathematical angle, I mean, um, or just from the costly signaling perspective, I see the argument, yes. Yeah. But I I will have to read up on his work on on this to to make up my mind in more detail. But it sounds plausible in the the way you explain it, yes. Well, we're we're happy to be a Yenta a matchmaker for you and Ed to collaborate. Yeah, and what one thing I wanted to say quickly is that it's important, Hannes. You were talking earlier about the games not matching up, and I just want to like connect the dots for listeners that one of the reasons why it's important for the games to

correspond to the phenomenon is from an evolutionary perspective, the games sort of embody the selective logic, right? So it's the question of why would genes for quote unquote or designed for doing something in a particular situation be selected for. And it's the games that sort of distill that down into something that can actually be sort of a genetic, like this is favorite over this. And as you're saying, if you don't model the costs and benefits correctly, so for example, as you said, Hannes, like, you know, if saving somebody's life only benefits you ten dollars, but it's David saying it's hugely beneficial, it might get you like, you know, a whole better life, for example, then uh we're not going to be accurate about

what would be selected for the psychology. So that's why it's important. It's not just sort of like a mundane like bookkeeping thing, it's actually really important for what would be selected for. I also just want to say quickly, Anthony Lopez and I started doing a project we we still have to do it and Anthony, we should have on um about valor and sort of combat situations. And one thing that sort of immediately struck me is there's also a difference between sort of bravery or valor and recklessness. Um like in the cost benefit thing too. And I think that's an interesting question of sort of when is behavior, even from a third party perspective, seen as reckless um versus like heroic or or yeah.

Oh I I I read all the Medal of Honor citations for World War One, World War Two, the Korean War and the Vietnam War for a study that I did back in the days. And I can tell you so if you're interested in this difference, then read them. So I can also give you my data. I mean, I would love to just or just have a chat about it. I I I recall reading one study where they looked at uh Medal of Honor recipients and they looked at the number of offspring they had and they found that um uh honor uh medal recipients end up ended up siring more offspring, which is kind of an interesting um. Um I remember uh I I always thought of bravery. At some point, I maybe I'll think about writing this up, but it it seems like the stag hunt

captures bravery really nicely, and that there are two so in the stag hunt, we can either all work together to hunt stag, or um I can uh we can all hunt hair uh individually. Um and um and so there's a potential for a larger collective benefit. We all get more food if we can work together to hunt stag, but we have this temptation to just uh uh do the the low risk thing and just get hair by ourselves, and at least we'll have some food. But if I try to hunt stag and no one else joins me, then I get nothing. And so we all we are all better off if we coordinate on the stag equilibria. Um, and but the problem is that hair is also an equilibrium uh in that game. Um and so uh so it's a it's a it's an interesting coordination game.

But what I think bravery is, or it might be, is uh the person who's the first person to stick their neck out to go for stag, right? Because they're providing uh uh basically a group service. They're helping us coordinate on the better equilibrium between those two. And you could think of you know an analogous situation, you know, if we're in a totalitarian regime, it's a similar kind of stag hunt. We could all work together to overthrow the regime, or we could privately kowtow to the regime and you know, curry favor with them and gain our own private benefits. Um and what what a brave person is, is they're a person who takes a stand against the regime and tries to shift the equilibrium toward the more uh group beneficial uh one.

Um and and and you know the reason why we have we hold brave people to such high esteem is because they're doing a kind of public good. They're doing a service for the group to help us converge on the more group beneficial uh equilibrium. Anyway, that's just a uh at some point I had that that idea about that it might be cool to formalize bravery in those terms. Do you buy that or or is there something to that? So again sounds sounds at first uh hearing at first very plausible but i i've just anecdotally i have some some um information for you on this one because i talked to a psychologist who was actually working for the dutch military i think at that point neuroscientist slash psychologist he said well

it's it's not very difficult to select people on fearlessness right so you could also say bravery is something like showing that you are not afraid of anything and he said essentially we could like recruit only fearless people into the military but we don't do this. Oh wow because um being afraid is very important in war. Yeah. So that you don't risk your life for the for the for the most um like minuscule goal, right? Just to show off. Yeah. But you really want soldiers to be able to calculate risks and benefits and only go for it if the calculation is right and like don't overperceive small benefits and all these kinds of things. Um so Yeah, that's recklessness, right? Like that's actually, I mean, that was part of the analysis for Anthony and I was sort of

that, yeah, or for me, like the that recklessness. Yeah, you only have so much life. You're not a cat. Yeah, it's interesting. I have the intuition that that a brave person is not someone who's fearless, but someone who is afraid but does it anyway, right? Does the brave thing despite their fear. Yeah, but I think, David, that's really important because I also think it's sort of there's also a a perspective shift in in bravery or in valor, which is that it's actually not about the person doing it, but it's actually a third party holding up a behavior of somebody did and say, do more of this. Right. So for from so from the perspective, it's almost like rhetoric or propaganda, sort of like, look, let's hold up this behavior somebody did, do more of it.

So if you're like a military and somebody sort of like did something brave, the person on the ground might have just been at the right place at the right time. Like I'm not saying like people aren't brave. There's incredible bravery in the world. But but there's also situations where somebody's just like, Well, I'm in this situation. What's the best thing to do? And they do it. And then the military sees the benefits of that or they put themselves at risk and they're aware that other people weren't willing to do that. And they just sort of like prop this up as do more of this. So, David, it's exactly like this group coronation thing, but it's a more sort of cynical take on it, which is we have this entry of like here, this person did something beneficial

to the group that was self-sacrificing. And whether or not they liked doing it, whether or not they want to tell other people to do it, we're gonna tell other people to do it. And we're gonna tell people it was great and we're gonna reward it. Right. So it's like the same similar thing of like, if you do this too, we're gonna reward it too. So it's so it's like rhetoric for sacrificing for the group. I can I can really only recommend systematically reading these Medal of Honor citations because you have the full spectrum of what has been awarded a medal for bravery there. And there are some cases where you would immediately say, Okay, this is like the the super brave, this is the typical scenario that you think of where somebody runs like into

enemy front lines just to rescue the injured comrade and he and takes him back um safe, or maybe even dies doing this. But there are also other cases. This is from World War II, where I don't know the exact situation anymore, but the setup was essentially: I'm an injured American soldier. I cannot move anymore. My my squad, my group wants to retreat because the Germans are coming. I tell them, Well, you leave me behind here. I'm gonna take this machine gun and like hold them back as long as I can. And then I literally I remember almost literally the citation then read essentially, when they returned to recover his body the next morning, they found 100 dead Germans lying around his position. Right.

I was like, whoa, okay. So this guy really like went down fighting. Yeah. He got the medal posthumously for this, just like you would suggest, I think, for for other people to see here's how you're supposed to die if you die. Right? So if you have to die, do it this way and don't just kill yourself or um don't just um give up. I mean, he could have easily just taken his own life, right? So he could have been super afraid there's a battalion of Germans coming, and he just anticipates that he has to die, so he wants to do it in a humane way. No, but he just took the machine and held them off as long as possible. Yeah. And I just say too, just as you bring that up, and Hannes, you and I kind of laughed about

this, is that one thing I love about science in people and just groups, it's worth saying is like, you know, my son was born in Berlin. I'm an American. We're Germans and Americans here. Um, you know, if it was, if you rewinded the clock um you know decades ago, we would be in a very different relationship than we are now. We would have been fighting. Um, and I think just one thing that's horrible about people is is that we do that. But then also what's wonderful about people is that uh we group boundaries change or relationships change. And I just love the fact that, you know, Hannes, you and I reflected on like, you know, our ancestors were on different sides, but um, you know, we have a lovely relationship, and

you know, my son was born in Berlin. Um, and uh I just I just love um uh that that group boundaries and relationships can change very, very strongly relatively quickly, and that's like a nice lesson. Um you know, for example, German and American. I I I do tend to see the picture a bit more complex, even and would be thinking, well, even if we had lived during those times, we might have been very constructively peer-reviewing each other's academic papers while if you had pushed us onto the battlefield, essentially would have shot at each other, right? Yeah, yeah. Um, who uh who was it? It wasn't um one of the 10ologists. Um, Conrad, no, wasn't Conrad Lorenz, it was maybe it was um wrote one of

the um one of the excellent things in uh a uh Russian gulag, like with bird beaks, um, is incredible um things. So yeah, just interesting, uh interesting real life sort of consequences. But yeah, no, I that's a that's an interesting point, Hannes. That's right. That even in that situation, we might have had a sort of a multi-faceted relationship with the groups. Yeah. And for me, like returning a little bit to what we discussed about the stability of in-group favoritism, of course this is overstretching this one particular empirical result that I have there. And but I I I I tend to be inspired by it to think, well, if one day the incentives force us to shoot at each other, that doesn't mean that it creates

such a hatred and hostility between us that the next day we wouldn't be able to discuss academic stuff again, right? Right. Yeah, I think that's a flip side. I think people have, especially people who haven't been through conflict, have this idea that it's sort of a monster, like it's monsters who do these things. And I think when you hear people talk, they're always shocked that somebody who is like especially like in a genocide or a civil war, somebody who picked up a gun and shot at people, you know, a decade or two decades later is just a normal person and might even be interacting with the people that they were trying to kill. And I think it's it's sort of an ambivalent thing because on the one hand it's sort of

like, well, anybody could do this, but it's exactly right, Hannes. On the flip side, though, is that it makes it so it's not inevitable, right? Yeah. So I think in the paper at some point I write it shows us that in-group favoritism is malleable for better or for worse. And so you can you can make people enemies, but you can also repair that again, hopefully. Yeah. So I guess maybe a lesson is be very careful about the people who are telling you who your enemies are. Yeah, that that of course. This is just the evil leader holding up the coordination sign and saying, let's just gang up on those people, don't trust those people. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, bringing it full circle. I mean, that that is itself a kind of exploitation, is the way we defined it, where you are

the leader is trying to demonize all the outside options to their leadership, um, and in so doing is able better able to exploit their their followers. Yeah. Yeah. Slight of hand sometimes, right? Because there's also, as we talked about at the beginning too, it's also if you are being exploited, uh, it's really not in the exploiter's interest to tell you that. And maybe that's even in their interest to sort of like scapegoat another group, right? So if I'm exploiting David, boy, it's in my interest to tell David that it's really honest who's doing this to you. And it comes back to this, it's cheaper to sort of fool somebody than like imprison them, right? Or like, you know, or fight them. Uh so if I can sort of deceive David about why he's being exploited or who's doing

it, even if David has the time or energy or strength to fight, if I can convince him he the about the wrong villain, then I don't incur any of the cost. And so that should be especially important design too. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, there have been lots of you know false flag operations throughout history where um a regime will stage an attack in order to uh galvanize oppon opposition to a group and it it it harkens back to exactly this logic. It's often even cheaper to stage an elaborate false flag than it is to actually um coercively force someone to do your bidding. Um even when the deception is very costly it's still often cheaper. Yeah. Hannes we always ask is there anything that we should have asked you?

Um I mean, you're the hosts, right? So by definition, yeah. Yeah, that's the um. I mean, can you talk a little bit about how did you come across evolutionary uh stuff? Lucky coincidence. So I had a very, very, very inspiring professor in philosophy. And Gerhard Foulmer is his name. And he is well known in the German landscape, philosophy landscape, for bringing evolutionary ideas into epistemology. So he wrote a book called Evolutionary Epistemology. And he was someone who trained me right from the beginning of my studies, actually, to see every type of human behavior through evolutionary angles. and maybe a bit too much so right um but um this is this is where i got in in in contact first with that and i i just was like

primed by it and never stopped thinking this way with with a little grain of salt because the more I'm into economics now so I switched fields around I don't know after my first PhD And in economics, evolutionary thinking is relatively underdeveloped. It was a thing in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and there's some really good work still being done, and also from back in the days. But economists tend to think more in terms of social norms, for example. So rational behavior, of course, incentives and rational behavior, that's the baseline. But then also social norms and how people like came up with institutions that then govern how they should be doing things, and part of those are social norms. And I think this very interesting like domain where you think about I I

still am complete completely by the brain as a developed, how you always say it, like a like an evolved machine that helps you make sense of stuff and behave in the world, completely by this. But there's there's an additional layer of information that goes into this machine, which is norms, of course. Um I I think these norms can have and the evolution or the development dynamics of institutions over time, they can live a life of them of their own a little bit, not completely detached from the requirements of the machine of the brain. Yeah. Also the incentives that you have when you have people interacting in economies or in countries. Um but when you take the evolutionary perspective and overly do so, then you might like reduce the importance of norms and

institutions a bit too much, in my view now. So I got quite interested in this like getting rid or not getting rid, but just ignoring, abstracting away from the underlying evolved functionality of the brain a little bit, and then just seeing where you can get in terms of expla explanatory value just with norms and institutions. Right. And um this is also, I mean, this is this is also what I what I like doing now. But I haven't forgotten about evolutionary underpinnings of everything. So yeah, I think you've recapitulated sort of the cultural evolution and adaptationist sort of thing, where it's it's sort of we talk, you know, it's sort of you can have a, as Christina Moya would put it, it's sort of not a strong commitment, but it's just sort of

like a heuristic, right? Where it's you can simplify or even just ignore the psychology and just assume sort of people are rational, and then just ask the question of given rationality, um, what would uh what kinds of norms would stabilize given interest dynamics and agent based dynamics, right? And it's sort of beyond the level of what's called individual or methodological individualism, which is just jargon for just studying the individual person. Um, but then at a certain point, rationality, if you unpack it, is a Q-based evolved system. And so the more you know about one, the more you can know about the other. So no, I think that's that's right. And I I that's um you've you've recapitulated, I think, a very deep and fundamental

historical point. Um, and you know, to your credit, you're sort of um articulating it even in your own work. Yeah. Yeah. No, uh the way I see it is j is different levels of analysis. It's one thing to understand an individual human mind and how it's structured and how it works. It's quite another thing to put uh a bunch of human minds together and see how they interact over time. And in that case, you get uh you know a different level of analysis, you get the population level of analysis, which can often lead to um wild, chaotic, random things emerging, um, through the interaction of of these different minds that are sensitive to different variables. Um and uh yeah, and at times it can even take on a life of its own, which which we might

call cultural evolution, we might call um you know institutional history or or or something like that. But um yeah. Yeah, I think it's also gotten better. I mean, at least in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, I think our generations have gotten better. I mean, I think it was there were some necessary battles in the previous generations, but at least in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, I think most of us sort of understand that they're not in conflict. You know, I don't know how it is in economics still. Like, I don't know. I I mean, I know there was a character of economics that's sort of it's very rational. And like, you know, there's like a little person in the head, and you're not allowed to say

there's evolved design. And I know you again, as you said before, you don't want to paint a whole community in one broad brush and say all economists think this way. And there's certainly like you and other people, evolutionary economists or sophisticated economists who think about the psychology. But I think it's gotten better. But what I don't know, what's your take on us in economics? Or is that a false question because it's not a unitary field? Yeah, of course it's it would be overgeneralizing to say all economists think of people as purely rational or purely irrational or what have you. But I think part of the part of the answer to why economists focus on different aspects is also because they're interested in different

questions. It's just one of the main economic questions is how do we need to design institutions in order them to it like enforce collective behavior that is efficient and optimal with respect to certain criteria that we can define ourselves. Right. So we could also ask the question as an economic research question, how do we need to design a redistribution, an institution that redistributions that redistributes um wealth and resources in a society for everybody to accept that institution and consider it fair to some degree. It's a question that you can work on using economic methodology. And you need to in order to to to to like really work on it, you probably need a good understanding of what fairness is, what people

perceive as fair. And there again you enter the realm of psychology and all the evolutionary um things become relevant again. But yeah, so I think it's it's not in do or die either, or it's really just um if you want to design institutions that achieve a certain type of behavior, you can do that without thinking about the underlying thing. You can just try it out and see what works. Um or you can do it in a more informed uh way and then try to understand what people really perceive as fair and so on. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The reason actually why or why I would say I like economics so much is that we have the formal language that allows us to model all these kinds of questions. It's not that we're the better psychologists or that we're the better sociologists or so.

It's just um the methodology is a bit more sharp, I would say. Yeah. Which can be an advantage or a disadvantage. But I could tell you about this because like putting everything into maths also doesn't solve all the problems. It's just makes communication sharper and clearer. But I do like economics a lot because of this, because it's possible at least to do this. Yeah, no, I'm I'm a fan of of the discipline as well, and uh and you know wish there were more integration between economics and and evolutionary psychology. Uh and I I I also like the the precision that um formalizing things allows you to achieve. Uh if if if you don't try, at least make the the attempt to formalize your intuitions, then um then your communication is just going to be uh way less precise.

And I think you're gonna achieve fewer and deeper insights uh than if you if you really tried to think hard about you know how you're defining things in a way that you could even you could translate it into into a number or or a parameter. Um also makes it, by the way, easier to see if something has been worked on before. So if if your research question and your modeling approach converges to something to like a formula or a model that's out there in the literature already, then you directly see, ah, okay, I you I'm using different labels. So my Tische Stuhle Bierseide, right? So I'm using different different labels there, but the question seems to be the same. And then you can just more easily draw on the existing knowledge without having to reinvent

everything. Yeah. Yeah, I think Deanne Conroey Beam has a talk about evolutionary approaches and formalization. Maybe we can have a group talk. I can I can be on the side of uh formalization, swimalization, but I don't I don't actually think that, but I do think there's like I've there there's a it can be gamed like anything else, you know. And I think there's sort of like you you it's just like any other tool you know you gotta use it in the right way for the right purpose and yeah but uh yeah yeah I I obviously I don't disagree with this this part. Yeah. Well uh Hannes, I think we're coming up on the end here, but um you know I I will say that uh you are just doing such incredibly important work.

Um and I just love how thorough and logical it is and I just to your credit, I mean even just this conversation, it's gotten me thinking so much about um every time I talk to you, I'm just excited about science. Um, and I think studying a really important real-world thing with that level of formalization, I think is really hard. And I think you have a real knack for um for combining those two in a way that I think most of us really struggle with. So you're thank you for doing that. Um, it's a you're you're very um special and talented at doing that. Thank you so much for A having me and for B running the podcast because I think it's it's really a valuable contribution to the evolutionary psychology

community. And also like I think it fills it fills a gap that I was always like um aware of, but never really found a good way to fill. So I was always thinking it would be nice to have a format which is called fireplace conversations with interesting researcher A or B or C, right? This is exactly what you're doing. So I I like it a lot. Yeah. We have to work on the fireplace. Yeah. Maybe we should get some fake fireplace backgrounds behind us. Some some some soundtrack. Um uh yeah, but um no, no, no, but Hannes, yeah, no, thank you so much. And thank you for being interesting. I mean, that's the hardest part. The fire is easy, the interesting uh researcher D or H in this case. Yeah. Yeah. Uh but yeah, thank you so much again, Hannes.

And again, I would just want to plug for um, you know, uh if you're looking at for interesting um uh context to work in, I really want to stress the Max Planck uh institute and um Hannes, I think if there's any justice in the world, maybe you'll get a permanent directorship someday. So if if the MPG is listening, please consider Hanus for for one. Thank you so much, David. I mean and and a and a medal of honor too while we're in it. No, no. Maybe just to advertise for the society. I mean, we currently have a the society currently has a call out for um group leader positions. So if you think this could be something for you, go to the website, Max Planck Society, and check it out, apply. Yeah. It's a it's an incredible institution in the broad sense of the word, and also

specifically, and there's lots of different MPIs, lots of different places. And uh it's a lovely uh place uh where research and deep thinking and novel thinking that pushes boundaries is valued for real, which is lovely so and rare. So thank you, Johannes, for being on. Thank you for doing the work you're doing, and thanks for your time. Thanks for having me. David, if you enjoyed this episode, well, first, David, did you enjoy this episode? I had a great time. I learned a lot. I love this. I had so I uh you know, this is I I'm happier after being part of this episode. So um and if you feel that way, then uh please keep listening. Uh please leave a positive review. Um, and you know, just yeah, uh honestly just spread the word um so that more and more

people are listening. And um, if you want to also, you know, we have a Patreon and send send us or, you know, a a more wealthy friend of yours than you are our way. Yeah. Yeah. Do all of those things. Leave us a kind review. And uh since this episode was about exploitation, I will say that all those other podcasts really suck. We're the only one that you should listen to. Yeah. Uh see you all next week.