Behavioral symmetry with humanomics: public choice and moral community

The humanomics model of human behavior suggests that individuals act not merely to maximize narrow conceptions of their own self-interest but instead are motivated by fellow feeling and a desire to act in a praiseworthy way. Because they learn what is praise- and blameworthy from face-to-face exchanges in moral communities to which they belong, the same conceptions and norms carry into impersonal exchanges in the extended market order. Humanomics offers a framework that can reconcile conflicting results from laboratory experiments involving personal and impersonal exchanges. In this paper, we seek to apply the humanomics lens to human action in politics. Public choice scholarship applies assumptions from economics to explain human action in the political sphere. But just like traditional economics models, several puzzles remain unexplained. We argue that a humanomics perspective offers a framework for explaining existing public choice puzzles just as it does for puzzles in economics more broadly.

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