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Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 19, Number 3—Summer 2005—Pages 131–145
Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist
Nava Ashraf, Colin F. Camerer and George Loewenstein
In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith famously argued that
economic behavior was motivated by self-interest. But 17 years earlier in 1759,
Smith had proposed a theory of human behavior that looks anything but selfinterested.
The “impartial spectator” plays many roles in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
When it comes to choices that involve short-term gratification but long-term costs,
the impartial spectator serves as the source of “self-denial, of self-government, of
that command of the passions which subjects all the movements of our nature to
what our own dignity and honour, and the propriety of our own conduct, require”
(Smith, 1759 [1981], I, i, v, 26), much like a farsighted “planner” entering into
conflict with short-sighted “doers” (Shefrin and Thaler, 1981; Meardon and Ortmann,
1996). In social situations, the impartial spectator plays the role of a
conscience, dispassionately weighing the conflicting needs of different persons.
Smith (I, i, v, 29) recognized, however, that the impartial spectator could be led
astray or rendered impotent by sufficiently intense passions: “There are some
situations which bear so hard upon human nature that the greatest degree of
self-government . . . is not able to stifle, altogether, the voice of human weakness, or
reduce the violence of the passions to that pitch of moderation, in which the
impartial spectator can entirely enter into them.”
In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that behavior
was determined by the struggle between what Smith termed the “passions” and the
“impartial spectator.” The passions included drives such as hunger and sex, emotions
such as fear and anger, and motivational feeling states such as pain. Smith viewed
behavior as under the direct control of the passions, but believed that people could
override passion-driven behavior by viewing their own behavior from the perspective of
an outsider—the impartial spectator—a “moral hector who, looking over the shoulder
of the economic man, scrutinizes every move he makes” (Grampp, 1948, p. 317).
Adam Smith’s psychological perspective in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is
remarkably similar to “dual-process” frameworks advanced by psychologists (for
example, Kirkpatrick and Epstein, 1992; Sloman, 1996; Metcalf and Mischel, 1999),
neuroscientists (Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1996; Panksepp, 1998) and more recently
by behavioral economists, based on behavioral data and detailed observations of
brain functioning (Bernheim and Rangel, 2004; Benhabib and Bisin, 2004; Fudenberg
and Levine, 2004; Loewenstein and O’Donoghue, 2004). It also anticipates a
wide range of insights regarding phenomena such as loss aversion, willpower and
fairness (V. Smith, 1998) that have been the focus of modern behavioral economics
(see Camerer and Loewenstein, 2004, for a recent review). The purpose of this
essay is to draw attention to some of these connections. Indeed, as we propose at
the end of the paper, The Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests promising directions
for economic research that have not yet been exploited.
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