Coevolution of Behaviors and Institutions

This working group seeks to understand how the institutions that regulate social interactions – such as economic exchange, marital matching, and cooperation and conflict within and between groups – shape the evolution of individual preferences, norms, and other motivations, and in turn how the resulting individual behaviors shape the evolution of social institutions. Methods include stochastic evolutionary game theory, gene-culture co-evolutionary models, agent-based simulations, and behavioral experiments. To sharpen and discipline the theory-building process, we address such empirical puzzles as the innovation, persistence and demise of institutions regulating economic activity and the distribution of wealth. Another important theme is the nature and diversity of other-regarding preferences such as altruism and in-group bias, and their evolutionary origins and contemporary dynamics. Since 1998 this working group has convened an (almost)  annual meeting consisting of SFI faculty and others from disciplines including anthropology, archeology, biology, ecology, economics, history, philosophy,  law, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology. The topics to be discussed at the proposed 2015 meeting will depend on the participants invited to join the organizers (currently under discussion).