The love principle

Humans have a huge capacity to fall in love and celebrate that capacity in poetry and song. Yet, how does one understand the evolutionary function and stylised psychological mechanism of love? In this entry, we describe a general principle of love as juxtaposed with greed: we propose that while greed is an attempt at grabbing what we want from a position of dominance, love is an attempt at getting what we want via submission. Humans choose dominance when they perceive they can and love when they perceive they must. We formalise these ideas into a ‘Love Principle’ that offers social scientists a means of studying that most mysterious of motive forces, the counterpoint of greed, the greatest joy in our souls, and the most glaring omission in economists’ models of people: our capacity to love.