The same face of the two Smiths: Adam Smith and

How do we go from personal to impersonal exchange? How do we go from cooperation among kin to cooperation among strangers? Economic theory today explains the presence of cooperative behaviors and other-regarding behavior in terms of evolu-tionary biology and/or utilitarianism. Cooperation makes us evolutionarily fit, and it is in our interest to cooperate, at least in the long run. We create complex human society through this evolutionary process and through the internalization of the rules that allow us to trade successfully with strangers. These explanations are correct but fall short of explaining how we generate, internalize, and institutionalize those rules of cooperation that allow us to go from personal to impersonal exchange. Adam Smith’s ideas of moral imagination, sympathy, and innate desire to be both praised and praiseworthy may offer a possible way to integrate and complete these explanations. The idea to use Adam Smith and some of the literature of his time to integrate the picture of human behavior emerging from experimental economics originates with Vernon Smith. In 1998 Vernon Smith introduced The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) – the “other ” book of Adam Smith – into the experimental literature. Vernon Smith used TMS to help explain some experimental results with human and non-human primates and how those results relate to evolutionary biology. Given th