Beginning with Multiple Selves

This chapter turns to two recent game-theory-based views that reject the atomistic individual conception and explain how people seen to have multiple selves can be thought to be single individuals. Interaction is central to understanding individuals as it was in the last chapter, but the interaction explained in this chapter operates simultaneously on two levels rather than on just one: interpersonally between individuals as before but now also intrapersonally between their respective multiple selves. I first discuss Michael Bacharach’s view in which individuals have multiple selves because they identify with different social groups, but in which these multiple selves also identify with the single individual understood as a team. Bacharach employs the same psychology social identity framework as Akerlof and Kranton, but he replaces their utility function representation of individuals with his multiple selves team representation of individuals. Second, I discuss Don Ross’s neuroeconomics individual conception in which people’s different neural selves are relatively independent agents that play intrapersonal games with one another that produce single unified individuals who then play interpersonal games with one another. Like Bénabou and Tirole, Ross explains the intrapersonal interaction between an individual’s multiple selves game-theoretically, but in contrast to their intrapersonal noncooperative game analysis he explains these intrapersonal games as coordination games.

Whereas Bacharach and Ross both seek to explain how having multiple selves underlies being a single individual, they have quite different views regarding what people’s multiple selves are. Bacharach sees individuals’ multiple selves as their supra-personal social identities. Thus, to show that people are single individuals, he needs to show that they do not dissolve into the many different social groups with which they identify. Ross sees individuals’ multiple selves as their sub-personal neural selves. Thus, to show that people are single individuals, he needs to show that they do not fragment into their many competing sub-personal selves. Bacharach and Ross are thus concerned with the two different boundaries that single-individual explanations must jointly address. These are the boundaries, as was said in Chapter 1, that Nathaniel Wilcox uses in applying the concept of agency to single individuals (Wilcox 2008, 527). For him, Bacharach’s supra-personal orientation makes the “fusions of agency” the problem that needs to be solved to explain single individuals, whereas Ross’s sub-personal orientation makes the “fission of agency” the problem that needs to be solved to explain single individuals. That is, for Bacharach the problem is how there are individuals and not just social groups, whereas for Ross the problem is how there are individuals and not just neural activity.