Tipping waiting staff is a pro-social behaviour that seems to run counter to opinions that people are always self-interested. In this article “a UCLA researcher argues that rather than assuming people are basically selfish, government could more profitably encourage pro-social behaviour.”
Most of our thinking about how to influence human behavior — how to get people to pay taxes, to obey laws, to not steal from each other — rests on the model of homo economicus.
This creature, first sketched by economists more than a century ago, is generally out for his own rational self-interest. He (or she) is, in short, selfish, and when we want him to do something, policymakers usually keep that in mind.
Lynn Stout, a professor of corporate law at UCLA, began to wonder about this deeply entrenched assumption, which leaves little room in human behavior for what we might call a “conscience.”
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