The Game We Design
I’ve been thinking a bit about Thomas Hobbes. It’s not that I enjoy conjuring images of life being “nasty, brutish, and short.” But I’ve been hearing about and discussing a theory that’s been making the rounds again, which is the “thin veneer theory.” There are variations on it, but you may have heard some version that goes like this. Civility is just a fragile overlay keeping our beastly instincts at bay (that’s the thin veneer). And if you strip away the structure of society, then we’d descend into chaos. This is followed by some post-apocalyptic thought experiments and someone who always wants to talk about Lord of the Flies.
At first glance, the theory sounds plausible, even intuitive perhaps. It did to me, at first. But behavioral science complicates the narrative, in a good way I think.
Recent studies have repeatedly shown that human behavior is far more context-driven than we’ve historically given it credit for. We’re not walking bundles of stable traits just waiting for the right moment to snap. We’re more like tuning forks because we resonate in response to the environments we’re in. Cooperation, fairness, and empathy aren’t actually just brittle masks. They’re actually adaptive tools and evolutionary assets. And they’re surprisingly durable when the context supports them.
Which brings me back to Hobbes. What if, when he looked out at society, he wasn’t wrong about what he saw, but what if instead he was wrong about why he saw it?
Hobbes lived through civil war, political upheaval, and widespread instability. If people acted like jerks, it might not have been because they were jerks at their core, but because the game they were playing was design to produce selfishness and fear. A situational psychologist might suggest that Hobbes didn’t witness a parade of moral depravity. Instead he just saw a bad context producing predictable outcomes.
One of the more enduring lessons from behavioral science is that the situation, or the design of the environment, often tells us more about behavior than a person’s supposed disposition ever could. People aren’t kind or cruel in a vacuum. They’re responding to incentives, constraints, and the subtle rules of the systems around them.
It’s impactful to remember that, especially in modernity, we design those systems. We build the structures that shape the game. Which means the behavior we observe isn’t a referendum on the soul, it’s instead a reflection of the setting. That’s not to say individual agency is irrelevant, but it does mean we should tread lightly when diagnosing human nature as fixed or inherently flawed.
The thin veneer theory may offer a dramatic lens on humanity, but it sells us short. Not just morally, but practically. If we believe people are naturally bad, we’ll design institutions that assume the worst. And then we’ll act surprised when those institutions produce exactly that.
But if we start from a different assumption, which is that people are deeply sensitive to their contexts, and that decency is both innate and situationally responsive, then we unlock something better. Maybe not utopia, but a game of life that’s worth redesigning.
