Fall 1999
John Orbell joined the University of Oregon Department of Political Science in 1967. Supported over the years in his research by more than a dozen grants from the National Science Foundation, Orbell has written or contributed to fifty scholarly papers. In 1997, he was named Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Political Science by the UO College of Arts and Science. The following year he became director of the UO Institute for Cognitive and Decision Sciences.
What are cognitive and decision sciences, and what do we learn by studying them?
JO: This is a new and rapidly developing field that stretches from technical studies of the human brain to questions of how that brain navigates through the complex waters of ongoing social relationships.
How would you describe the current state of this research?
JO: Cognitive sciences have gone through a phenomenal period of growth in the past fifteen years. Convergence of a number of fields -- including cognitive science, evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology -- has put us in the same kind of place as people in the biological sciences found themselves just before the discovery of the structure of DNA.
DNA was the holy grail of biology. The holy grail of social sciences, the key to understanding human beings, is understanding consciousness. What is consciousness? Where is our consciousness? Why do we have it? How much do we have? Answering these monumentally important questions may soon be within our reach.
How did we come to this exciting place?
JO: Studies in disciplines ranging from biology to psychology to anthropology are laying out a pattern of how the human brain evolved. Many scholars working in this area have proposed that the most critical part of the ancestral environment for the evolving human brain was not the physical environment or the predator-and-prey relationships with other species, but the environment provided by other humans.
Why are interactions with people so important?
JO: Other humans provide a vast source of cultural knowledge that we can inherit without having to discover it for ourselves. Even more important, they provide opportunities for all-important cooperative relationships. According to the ideas of evolutionary psychology, the human brain is in large part a bundle of special-purpose modules. These modules have evolved as information-processing mechanisms for efficiently solving problems of individuals relating with one another.
Are there other implications of these ideas?
JO: Yes. One line of thought suggests that the whole structure of human cognition -- the way we come to understand things -- might be organized around our need to successfully interact with each other. In other words, our ability to reflect on ideas ranging from black holes and quarks to freedom and justice might be by-products of brains primarily designed to interpret and reason about the likely behavior and responses of other members of our own species.
This raises some interesting questions. How do brains designed in this way over hundreds of millennia in a premodern world select, process, and organize information from the modern social environments in which we find ourselves today? And what kinds of behaviors can we expect in response? What kinds of problems might arise? What opportunities?
How does one go about researching such seemingly intangible qualities of human existence?
JO: I worked for ten to fifteen years with Robert Dawes (formerly of the UO) doing experiments on how humans make choices that are individually beneficial but publicly damaging. A classic example is environmental pollution -- where it might benefit a person's own finances to avoid the high costs of properly treating waste products while it is damaging to society. We, and a great many other researchers, have examined this question, mostly by observing how people play carefully constructed games that illuminate the dynamic between public and private advantage.
And what has this research found?
JO: There are many particular findings, but a central theme of the empirical work is that we are not appropriately understood as "isolated individuals" but as "social animals"to use Aristotle's famous phrase. We are designed (by evolution) as social animals, hyper responsive, and sometimes responsible, to others around us. There has been strong evolutionary selection for the kind of brain that allows humans to survive and prosper in social groups. People are fundamentally social in their brain structure and generally make decisions accordingly. Often this is good news since it is the basis for productive cooperation. But it can also be bad news when it leads us to think about "our group" (the good guys) vs. "their group" (the bad guys).
Do you see practical implications in education, law, politics, or other areas where the individual and social intersect? How might the findings of this kind of research affect society in the future?
JO: I think that the immediate consequence for the social sciences -- thus for whatever the social sciences can do to help us with practical problems -- is that we have to accept that simple models of "rational, selfish maximizing" humans are not a sufficient basis for deriving theories about how social and economic systems work. Social policies founded on that "rational selfish actor" model can have perverse consequences. We do respond to incentives, of course, but evolutionary models of the brain can sometimes suggest why social pathologies of one kind or another do not vanish in response to simple positive and negative (usually monetary) incentives -- as it is often expected that they will. A more realistic model can lead to more informed and successful social policy.