Five Theories of Human Behavior
Predictive History identifies five competing frameworks that claim to explain what drives human behavior, religion (the war between good and evil), biology (sex and gene propagation), race and culture (civilizational struggle for dominance), economics (rational self-interest), and game theory (strategic interaction within rule-structured incentive systems), arguing game theory is the master framework because it can model any of the others' payoffs within a structural analysis.
Every major intellectual tradition offers an answer to the foundational question: why do humans behave the way they do? Religion frames life as a moral battle, the soul pulled between divine goodness and satanic temptation, with civilization's purpose being to strengthen the good impulse. Biology, following Darwin and evolutionary psychology, argues sex is the engine: males maximize reproductive opportunity while females maximize mate quality, producing the entire social architecture of courtship, status competition, and parental investment. Race-and-culture frameworks claim civilizational identity and group character drive behavior, with different ethnic traditions producing systematically different capabilities and outcomes.
Economics, from Adam Smith through the Chicago School, proposes that rational self-interest, maximizing utility given constraints, explains most observable behavior. People respond to prices, incentives, and opportunity costs with mechanical consistency. Game theory extends this insight by modeling not just individual optimization but strategic interaction: what you do depends on what you expect others to do, producing equilibria, coordination failures, and collective action problems that no individual actor chose or desires.
Predictive History's argument is that game theory is the most powerful framework because it is the most general: it can model games played for religious salvation, biological reproduction, cultural dominance, or material wealth, depending on which payoffs players actually respond to. The other frameworks describe the payoffs; game theory describes the structure within which any payoff is pursued. Understanding the structure, the rules, the players, the incentive architecture, allows prediction regardless of which deeper motivation drives the players.
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What are the five theories of human behavior? ＋
Religion (the war between good and evil inside every soul), biology (sex drive and gene propagation), race and culture (civilizational competition between groups), economics (rational self-interest maximizing utility), and game theory (strategic interaction within incentive structures). Predictive History argues game theory subsumes the others, it can model games played for any payoff, whether religious, biological, cultural, or material, making it the most powerful framework for predicting behavior.