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Gestures of Despair and Hope: A View on Deliberate Self-harm From Economics and Evolutionary Biology

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Abstract

A long-standing theoretical tradition in clinical psychology and psychiatry sees deliberate self-harm (DSH), such as wrist-cutting, as “functional”—a means to avoid painful emotions, for example, or to elicit attention from others. There is substantial evidence that DSH serves these functions. Yet the specific links between self-harm and such functions remain obscure. Why don’t self-harmers use less destructive behaviors to blunt painful emotions or elicit attention? Economists and biologists have used game theory to show that, under certain circumstances, self-harmful behaviors by economic agents and animals serve important strategic goals. In particular, “costly signals” can credibly reveal a “private state” in situations where verbal claims and other “cheap” signals might be disbelieved. Here, DSH is scrutinized using signaling theory, and a variant, the theory of bargaining with private information. The social contexts and associated features of DSH suggest that it might be a costly, and therefore credible, signal of need that compels social partners to respond.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Edward H. Hagen

  2. Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Paul J. Watson

  3. Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

    Peter Hammerstein

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  1. Edward H. Hagen
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  2. Paul J. Watson
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  3. Peter Hammerstein
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Correspondence to Edward H. Hagen.

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Hagen, E.H., Watson, P.J. & Hammerstein, P. Gestures of Despair and Hope: A View on Deliberate Self-harm From Economics and Evolutionary Biology. Biol Theory 3, 123–138 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1162/biot.2008.3.2.123

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