What makes Dr. Gregory House the best character on television isn’t his medical knowledge. It isn’t even his ruthless wit. It’s that he gets — really gets — human nature.
OK. Maybe I’m just as cynical as the title character of Fox’s hit medical drama “House.” After all, one of House’s key insights is “everybody lies.” But I prefer to think I’m a realist.
So, what is it about human behavior that House (Hugh Laurie) gets? First, he understands that people respond to incentives.
This is basic Economics 101, which means it’s a hard truth that most people would prefer not to believe. But anyone who has ever had to deal with a job-for-life government employee knows it’s true. Zero threat of losing your job equals zero incentive to do your job well. Car salesmen, on the other hand, get paid on commission. That means they have a powerful incentive to sell you a car — whether you want one or not — tempered only by their incentive not to alienate you as a future customer.
House understands this and even cites a classic example of behavioral economics.
In a recent episode, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” House offers up this bit of wisdom about how people respond to incentives: “You want people to drive safer? Take out air bags and replace them with machetes pointed at their necks. Nobody would drive over three miles per hour.”
I first came across that argument in Steven Landsburg’s 1993 book “The Armchair Economist.” Landsburg uses it to show that seat belts and air bags don’t actually save lives. People willingly accept a certain amount of risk. So, when you make vehicles safer, people drive more recklessly — just as they would drive more carefully if you made cars more dangerous.
Of course, most people don’t understand that.
On an automotive Web site, I found an article that said, “Surprisingly, that grim crash fatality statistic (40,000 deaths per year) has held steady for the past two decades — even as cars have become more crashworthy and sophisticated safety features more widely available.”
Here is what House would say to that article’s author: “You’re an idiot.” There’s nothing surprising about it if you understand incentives the way House does.
House also understands another subject that makes lots of people uncomfortable — evolution.
In the same episode, House is convinced that a patient’s extreme niceness must be a symptom of some underlying disease. Why? Because being nice with no expectation of getting something in return isn’t natural.
House explains: “Three cavemen see a stranger running toward them with a spear. One fights, one flees, one smiles and invites him over for fondue. That last guy didn’t last long enough to procreate.”
Evolutionary psychology holds that just as plants and animals pass down physical traits to future generations, people pass down behavioral traits. So, just as it does with physical traits, natural selection weeds out some behavioral traits — like extreme, naïve niceness — because the people who have them tend to die before passing them on.
This is the sort of evolution that upsets most liberals just as much as it upsets conservatives. It’s one thing to say that people’s physical characteristics are the product of millions of years of natural selection. But behavior? Lots of liberals hate that idea because if behavior is largely biologically driven, you can’t make people behave differently just by forcing them into sensitivity training.
But, as John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” They’re still facts whether you believe them are not.
That’s why all of the other characters on “House” think Dr. House is a jerk. He’s armed with more facts than anyone else on TV. And facts don’t necessarily play nice.
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