Speaker Series: Lara Buchak (Princeton) "Playing Risky Games"

Abstract:  I have argued elsewhere that individuals with different attitudes towards risk, considered as different ways to weigh worse scenarios against better ones, can be rational. If that is right, what should we expect to happen when such individuals interact with each other over time? I explore this question using tools from evolutionary game theory. I consider both cases in which individuals’ risk attitudes are fixed over time and cases in which they are periodically revised in response to experience. These models suggest that social interaction need not lead to convergence on a single risk attitude; that a diversity of risk attitudes increases stability in behavior; and that even though a diversity of risk attitudes leads to inequality in individual interactions, it need not generate social inequality more broadly. I conclude by discussing what these results suggest about the normative significance of risk diversity in social and institutional contexts.

Lara Buchak is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Her work spans decision theory, epistemology, ethics, social choice theory, and the philosophy of religion. Her book Risk and Rationality (2013) examines how people ought to take risk into account when making decisions, and argues that ordinary decision-makers can be fully rational even by ideal standards. Her subsequent work applies these ideas to ethical questions in distributive ethics, medical ethics, and climate policy. More recent work explores the nature and rationality of faith and its relationship to risk-taking, as well as how to take risk into account when evidence is ambiguous.