In Social Evolution Forum, a new blog from the Evolution Institute, SFI External Professors Herbert Gintis and Jessica Flack weigh in on the challenges of understanding the evolutionary forces that led to human cooperative behavior.
Gintis reviews past treatment of self-regarding behavior in economic and biological theory, asserting that generations of economists and biologists have been misled by theories that assume ubiquitous self interest. But new transdisciplinary experimental and analysis methods offer hope for insights, he says.
"By combining economic theory (game theory in particular) with the experimental techniques of social psychologists, economists, and other behavioral scientists, we can empirically test sophisticated models of human behavior in novel ways," he writes.
The prevalence of non-self-regarding human behavior in society and in experimental evidence, however, shows a "nexus of behaviors that we term strong reciprocity...a predisposition to cooperate with others, and to punish those who violate the norms of cooperation."
Gintis goes on to summarize recent research that points to evolutionary benefits of human altruism.
Read Gintis's complete essay (January 11, 2012)
Jessica Flack responds, noting that while game theoretic methods used in the last few decades have been helpful for developing compelling theories for the evolution of cooperation, more study is needed of spatial structure and social network structure as elements of evolutionary dynamics leading to behaviors.
"We know little empirically about the diversity of network structures constituting social systems, or how emergent, functionally significant, aggregate social properties are encoded in these networks," she writes. "We also know little empirically or formally about the timescales on which these social structures and their associated statistical properties change."
"Answering these questions requires study of the mesoscopic scale –- the causal networks that specify how different combinations of strategies produce different institutions," she adds. "Once we can describe how an aggregate social property is produced, we can study how the social process producing it might have evolved. The parameters in our game theoretic models will also become more empirically grounded."
Read Flack's complete response (January 11, 2012)
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