Review of HIDDEN GAMES
Are Humans Really Irrational? Not according to Game Theory
I am an evolutionary scientist by training, and I have a confession to make: game theory bores the neurons out of my brain. Every time I see a talk on game theory at a conference, or read a journal article on the topic I’m bored. This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate or understand how important game theory is to understanding human behavior, I just find discussions of it dense.
Until I read this new book.
The recently published Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior by Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli is a brilliant book that tackles an array of odd human behavior, like over the top rituals, norm enforcement, and sex-ratios. It’s quite astonishing how such complex social behavior can be mathematically understood through relatively simple calculations of costs, benefits, and primary rewards.
Hidden Games takes a different approach to presenting game theory and its explanatory powers. Rather than starting by explaining the math of the classical Prisoner’s Dilemma Game like every other piece of game theory writing, Hoffman and Yoeli instead hook you with a discussion to question why humans become passionate about random things, why learning matters, and why we have a roughly 1:1 ratio of men and women.
Even after those introductory chapters when they really launch into explaining different types of behavior with game theory, they don’t begin the chapter with the technical details of the particular ‘game’ they discuss. They instead share examples of behavior, explain the game theory as it applies, then end the chapter with all the technical details that typically scare (or bore) people away. Hoffman and Yoeli clearly understood the assignment of writing a popular science book.
The specific topic I found most interesting was why we use categorical norms – making punishing decisions based on black and white distinctions, categories, rather than more ‘rational’ nuanced and continuous distinctions. Why do we punish as a group this way?
Think about mask wearing norms during the pandemic (I’m in the US for context). Once vaccines became widely available, many vaccinated people were annoyed that they still had to mask. After all, isn’t that partly what the vaccines were for? Yes, but there would be no way to enforce the norm of mask wearing for just unvaccinated folks because vaccination status isn’t observable by others and it’s easy to lie about vaccination status with no consequence. Therefore, unvaccinated folks could (and did) not mask and no one would really punish them because who wants to ask every person they see if they are vaccinated or not? This actually happened and the mask wearing norm broke down as soon as ‘nuanced’ norms were expected.
I wonder too if this kind of ‘game’ can also explain the phenomenon of cancel culture whereby any violation or heterodox thinking on a hot political topic is condemned and the person ‘canceled’ in an attempt to enforce strong political norms. I can’t help but also wonder if these kinds of norm enforcement games can help explain, at least in part, the political polarization we’re experiencing here, too.
Hidden Games was a brilliant book. It’s the best writing on game theory I’ve read, and overall is phenomenally written.
Published: April 2022
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker (2021)
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom (2017)
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