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Emotions, feelings and morality play a critical role in our daily decision-making. With the rapid advance of industry and technology, however, this subjective information is becoming less valued in critical decisions. Rational thought and the accumulation of objective knowledge are often credited with humanity's thriving success in recent centuries. This book makes the case that humanity's social progress has only been possible through these too often repressed subjective factors, and will be equally crucial in altering the present course of society.
In this work aggression and conflict in man and other primates are interpreted in the light of evolutionary biology and game theory models. Unitl now interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences has been rare and hampered by different methodologies and terminology. Nevertheless, such cooperation is essential for elucidating the causes and consequences of aggression in humans and in explaining what shape aggression takes in particular situations. The aim of this volume is to present empirical and theoretical studies from biologists and social scientists to create an interdisciplinary framework for understanding aggression.
Game theory has revolutionized the study of animal behavior. The fundamental principle of evolutionary game theory--that the strategy adopted by one individual depends on the strategies exhibited by others--has proven a powerful tool in uncovering the forces shaping otherwise mysterious behaviors. In this volume, the first since 1982 devoted to evolutionary game theory, leading researchers describe applications of the theory to diverse types of behavior, providing an overview of recent discoveries and a synthesis of current research. The volume begins with a clear introduction to game theory and its explanatory scope. This is followed by a series of chapters on the use of game theory to unde...
Simple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. Yet, the social world also encompasses domains where social animals such as humans can learn from one another and can forge alliances with one another to boost their chances of success. According to the book's thesis, the undeniable complexity ...
This title invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others.
In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents with perfect information and unlimited time. About forty years ago, Herbert Simon challenged this view with his notion of "bounded rationality." Today, bounded rationality has become a fashionable term used for disparate views of reasoning. This book promotes bounded rationality as the key to understanding how real people make decisions. Using the concept of an "adaptive toolbox," a repertoire of fast ...
Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. Natalie and Joseph Henrich examine this phenomena with a unique fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation, ethnographic descriptions of social behavior, and a range of other experimental results. Their experimental and ethnographic data come from a small, insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians called Chaldeans, living in metro Detroit, whom the Henrichs use as an example to show how kinship relations, ethnicity, and culturally transmitted traditions provide the key to explaining the evolution of cooperation over multiple generations.
A comprehensive analysis of the genetic, ecological and phylogenetic aspects of social behaviour, by experts in the field.
This field of research examines how embodied and situated agents, such as robots, evolve language and thus communicate with each other. This book is a comprehensive survey of the research in this emerging field. The contributions explain the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field, and then illustrate the scientific and technological potentials and promising research directions. The book also provides descriptions of research experiments and related open software and hardware tools, allowing the reader to gain a practical knowledge of the topic. The book will be of interest to scientists and undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of cognition, artificial life, artificial intelligence and linguistics.
This volume explores from multiple perspectives the subtle and interesting relationship between the theory of rational choice and Darwinian evolution. In rational choice theory, agents are assumed to make choices that maximize their utility; in evolution, natural selection 'chooses' between phenotypes according to the criterion of fitness maximization. So there is a parallel between utility in rational choice theory and fitness in Darwinian theory. This conceptual link between fitness and utility is mirrored by the interesting parallels between formal models of evolution and rational choice. The essays in this volume, by leading philosophers, economists, biologists and psychologists, explore the connection between evolution and rational choice in a number of different contexts, including choice under uncertainty, strategic decision making and pro-social behaviour. They will be of interest to students and researchers in philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, economics and psychology.