michael_nielsen

I once had a conversation with an economist who was extremely puzzled about why people "volunteered free labor" to write Wikipedia articles. She had a lot to say about the costs, and wanted to think about reputational benefits etc.

I asked why she thought people played soccer in the park on the weekend, "volunteering free labor" to do so. And she started to talk about reputational benefits from friends watching etc. I proposed that maybe it might be "fun", but this was not considered plausible...

I wrote the above with a little snark, which I really don't like in myself. But that was one immensely frustrating conversation.

It was a person who, AFAICT, could no longer even see non-incentive based behaviours, at least in some spheres. My idea that some people wrote Wikipedia because it was such enormous fun was simply dismissed as totally implausible. Grr.

(Add the caveat that it was a rapid-fire conversation, after a talk, which means I may well have misunderstood, we may have been talking past one another, etc. But I don't think so. And certainly there do seem to be people whose main model is people responding to incentives...)

Related annoyance: human decisions interpreted universally as attempts to "signal" or "gain status". Yeah, definitely can play a role, sometimes large, sometimes small. But as a universal theory of behaviour, yikes!

cue physicists telling economists they know nothing about human behavior under constraints.