Long ago when I was a young wage cuck a group of us used to work late and would often play football in the office to decompress (Terry Tate Office Linebacker, Football in the Office). Now this was behavior was certainly explained by the fact that we were young guys recently out of college with too much energy to just sit in chairs all day. We were sometimes “caught” by older people who also worked late, but they understood and let us have our fun. That is until we were actually caught by the office manager who through a fit and complained to the CEO. I was a bit worried because when she was chastising us she kept bringing up our actions but not that we only did it late at night. And I was a little confused since she would often run around the office during the day in a performative way that even a young guy like me thought was kinda dangerous. The CEO was a good guy and just told us to be careful and not do it during the day.
The office manager focused on our behavior; while we focused on the context of it being at night. I considered the office manager’s running performative (“look how hard I’m working”) while maybe she actually considered her work important enough to run around the office in heels. This is called the fundamental-attribution-error: we explain other peoples behavior based more on their personality traits and less based on the situational context. Now is this always true? Of course not. The utility of the model (all-models-are-false-but-some-are-useful) is in reminding you to consider both personal traits and situational context when trying to explain behavior.
Thinking broader about personality traits and we get into fundamental drives. Thinking broader about situational context and we get into games. We can apply the concept of a game to pretty much all human activities with the added benefit that the concept of a game implies a rather robust structure. Games have purposes, rules and players who have goals, roles, strategies and whose behavior changes bases on feedback and incentives. So, while the Fundamental-attribution-error helps us remember to consider the situational context, the concept of games gives us a useful framework to at a rather deep level analyze situational context as it applies to human behavior.
- What games are going on here, and what are the purposes of those games?
- What are the rules of the games?
- Who are the players, what are their goals, do they have specific roles?
- What are the incentives for the players? (Meaning, when players are pursuing their goals what feedback do they receive that might cause them to change their behavior.)
- What strategies are being used?
Summary
- “Why is that NPC behaving that way?” “Well, do you know what game he is playing?”
- Fundamental-attribution-error: Explain peoples’ behavior based their personality traits rather than based on situational / environmental traits. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”
- Game-theory-games-rules-agents-goals-incentives-strategies: People are never just existing, they are always engaged in the various games of life. “Don’t hate the prisoner, hate the prisoner’s dilemma”
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