Herbert Gintis

Herbert Gintis (Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard University, 1969) is External Professor, Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Economics, Central European University. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) head a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. His web site, www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis, contains pertinent information. Professor Gintis published Game Theory Evolving (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and is coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). He is currently completing a book with Professor Bowles entitled A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution.

Recent Posts

June 27, 2012 in Biology

On the Evolution of Human Morality (a comment on Steven Pinker)

Why do fundamentally selfish beings, which is what humans are according to the selfish gene theory, accept cultural norms that contradict their natural strivings?
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January 11, 2012 in Focus Articles

The Evolution of Human Cooperation

The study of human cooperation today is the current state of a continuous line of intellectual inheritance from Adam Smith and David Hume, through Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Emile…
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