Selfish learning is more important than fair-minded conditional cooperation in public-goods games

Why does human cooperation often unravel in economic experiments despite a promising start? Previous studies have interpreted the decline as the reaction of disappointed cooperators retaliating in response to lesser cooperators (conditional cooperation). This interpretation has been considered evidence of a uniquely human form of cooperation, motivated by altruistic concerns for fairness and requiring special evolutionary explanations. However, experiments have typically shown individuals information about both their personal payoff and information about the decisions of their groupmates (social information). Showing both confounds explanations based on conditional cooperation with explanations based on individuals learning how to better play the game. Here we experimentally decouple these two forms of information, and thus these two learning processes, in public goods games involving 616 Swiss university participants. We find that payoff information leads to a greater decline, supporting a payoff-based learning hypothesis. In contrast, social information has small or negligible effect, contradicting the conditional cooperation hypothesis. We also find widespread evidence of both confusion and selfish motives, suggesting that human cooperation is maybe not so unique after all.

The Evolution of Evolutionary Explanations of Culture: How and Why Can a Critical Evaluation of Costly Signalling Theory Enhance Our Understanding of Cultural Practices?

<p>In the last two decades, evolutionary explanations of cultural practice have become prevalent within the social sciences and humanities, including religious studies. This thesis is a critical analysis and recension of one of these applications of evolutionary theory to cultural practice. Specifically, I analyse a secondary case study to investigate the explanatory power and politico-ethical considerations that arise from the application of costly signalling theory to Māori tā moko. Utilising primary and secondary source materials, this research was conducted within an interpretivist and inductive qualitative framework with the aim of offering a reflexive critique of the explanatory power that costly signalling theory carries for tā moko and, more broadly, of the illustrative efficacy of evolutionary explanations when applied to indigenous cultural practices. In a critique of the Cisco case study, I identify some of the more general, global deficiencies of evolutionary explanations of culture and explore the rich, indigenous narrative complexes which shape understandings of Māori tā moko. I maintain that the argument for moko as a costly signal, based, in part, upon Māori warfare is a reiteration of mythologised aspects of Māori culture which divorces tā moko from its ontological and epistemological underpinnings. In separating it from its Māori context, the reflexivity of tā moko is denied and Westernised and colonised conceptions of tā moko which etically view Māori cultural practice through a veil of alterity are perpetuated. In response to the concerns the application of costly signalling theory to tā moko generates, I propose an alternative model: transmissive assemblage. Drawing from actor-network theory, indigenous ontological perspectivism, and Kaupapa Māori, the transmissive assemblage model provides a symmetrical and decolonised framework which both challenges and enhances the dominant Western scientific paradigms used to explain indigenous practices. By focussing on the interactions between agents and the associations which circulate between them, rather than on the agents themselves, this integrative model makes an original contribution to scholarship in allowing the emergence of heteroglossia and by providing a balanced platform for indigenous voices and emic perspectives to be represented in the context of Western scientific research. In doing so, I argue that integrative, reflexive, and decolonised approaches to indigenous cultural practice which focus on process, as opposed to agency, enhance the explanatory power of evolutionary explanations by affording indigenous groups the opportunity to assert their own agency within the paradigm of Western science.</p>

The Evolution of Evolutionary Explanations of Culture: How and Why Can a Critical Evaluation of Costly Signalling Theory Enhance Our Understanding of Cultural Practices?

<p>In the last two decades, evolutionary explanations of cultural practice have become prevalent within the social sciences and humanities, including religious studies. This thesis is a critical analysis and recension of one of these applications of evolutionary theory to cultural practice. Specifically, I analyse a secondary case study to investigate the explanatory power and politico-ethical considerations that arise from the application of costly signalling theory to Māori tā moko. Utilising primary and secondary source materials, this research was conducted within an interpretivist and inductive qualitative framework with the aim of offering a reflexive critique of the explanatory power that costly signalling theory carries for tā moko and, more broadly, of the illustrative efficacy of evolutionary explanations when applied to indigenous cultural practices. In a critique of the Cisco case study, I identify some of the more general, global deficiencies of evolutionary explanations of culture and explore the rich, indigenous narrative complexes which shape understandings of Māori tā moko. I maintain that the argument for moko as a costly signal, based, in part, upon Māori warfare is a reiteration of mythologised aspects of Māori culture which divorces tā moko from its ontological and epistemological underpinnings. In separating it from its Māori context, the reflexivity of tā moko is denied and Westernised and colonised conceptions of tā moko which etically view Māori cultural practice through a veil of alterity are perpetuated. In response to the concerns the application of costly signalling theory to tā moko generates, I propose an alternative model: transmissive assemblage. Drawing from actor-network theory, indigenous ontological perspectivism, and Kaupapa Māori, the transmissive assemblage model provides a symmetrical and decolonised framework which both challenges and enhances the dominant Western scientific paradigms used to explain indigenous practices. By focussing on the interactions between agents and the associations which circulate between them, rather than on the agents themselves, this integrative model makes an original contribution to scholarship in allowing the emergence of heteroglossia and by providing a balanced platform for indigenous voices and emic perspectives to be represented in the context of Western scientific research. In doing so, I argue that integrative, reflexive, and decolonised approaches to indigenous cultural practice which focus on process, as opposed to agency, enhance the explanatory power of evolutionary explanations by affording indigenous groups the opportunity to assert their own agency within the paradigm of Western science.</p>

The Causal Structure of Natural Selection

Recent arguments concerning the nature of causation in evolutionary theory, now often known as the debate between the 'causalist' and 'statisticalist' positions, have involved answers to a variety of independent questions – definitions of key evolutionary concepts like natural selection, fitness, and genetic drift; causation in multi-level systems; or the nature of evolutionary explanations, among others. This Element offers a way to disentangle one set of these questions surrounding the causal structure of natural selection. Doing so allows us to clearly reconstruct the approach that some of these major competing interpretations of evolutionary theory have to this causal structure, highlighting particular features of philosophical interest within each. Further, those features concern problems not exclusive to the philosophy of biology. Connections between them and, in two case studies, contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of physics demonstrate the potential value of broader collaboration in the understanding of evolution.

Groepsidentificatie en cognitie

Group-identification and cognition: Why trivial conventions are more important than we think In existing (evolutionary) explanations for group formation and -identification, the function of cultural conventions such as social etiquette and dress codes is limited to providing group-markers. Group formation and identification itself is explained in terms of less arbitrary and more substantial phenomena such as shared norms and institutions. In this paper I will argue that, however trivial and arbitrary, cultural conventions fulfil an important cognitive function that makes them essential to the formation of and identification with large groups. Complex role-division, both informal and institutional, is important in the functioning of any large group of people. Shared conventions enable a virtually automatic understanding of signals, scripts and rules that regulate the interaction of divided roles. They provide a cultural infrastructure within which we perceive e.g. specific behavior and clothing as a range of social-cultural affordances for role-interactions. Shared familiarity with this infrastructure is the foundation for the basic kind of trust of in-group strangers that is a requirement for the formation of large groups. This non-intellectualist view on group formation and group identification can contribute to new ways of dealing with problems in multicultural societies.

Pedagogical implications of evolutionary explanations concerning interpersonal and intergroup relations

Making the world a safe place has been the aim of mankind since time immemorial. Representatives of various sciences have made an appreciable effort to help this dream come true. They have constructed theoretical systems and found practical solutions to problems which are the most significant for people. Unfortunately, in many cases research carried out by representatives of humanistic and social sciences has turned out to be unfruitful. Efforts which improve relations between people are particularly crucial for educationalists, that is they try to constrain or eliminate negative relationships with the view of benefits stemming from positive relations. In spite of considerable successes both in theory as well as in practical activities, we have to constantly face the necessity to answer the question: what should be done to bring together people who are willing to cooperate and love, not to perform diverse forms of aggression and rivalry?