The Evolution of Cognitive Capactities for Cooperation and Conflict

本研究项目研究人类主体认知能力的进化及其对潜在合作社会互动中策略行为的影响。该研究的出发点是，人是具有特殊目的的政治生物，具有处理合作和冲突遭遇的信息处理能力。这些互动的基本环境来自进化博弈论，在进化博弈论中，个体被随机匹配参加各种2人游戏，包括囚徒困境、纯冲突游戏和合作游戏。这项研究的新颖和不同之处在于，行动者的策略取决于对方的特征（例如，合作行为的强度或频率）。此外，行动者有能力核实或歪曲自己的特征。这些参与者的交流和认知能力受制于进化选择。所有这些活动都是在明确定义的计算机模拟中进行的，这些模拟贯穿了成千上万代的大型个体群体。研究结果说明了合作可以在各种环境中出现的条件。

This research project studies the evolution of cognitive capacities for human agents and the implications for strategic behavior in potentially cooperative social interactions. The research starts from the idea that people are political beings with special purpose information processing capacities for dealing with cooperative and conflictual encounters. The baseline environment for these interactions is taken from evolutionary game theory in which individuals are randomly matched to play a variety of 2-person games, including prisoner's dilemma, games of pure conflict and cooperative games. What is new and different in this research is that an actor's strategy is contingent on the counterpart's characteristics (e.g., strength or frequency of cooperative behavior). Moreover actors have a capacity to verify or misrepresent their own characteristics. The communication and cognitive abilities of those actors are subject to evolutionary selection. All of this activity takes place in well defined computer simulations that run through tens of thousands of generations with large groups of individuals. The results illustrate the conditions under which cooperation can emerge in a variety of environments.