What Strategic Structures Support the Evolution of Ethnocentrism?

• Game theory deals with the impact of strategic structure on interactions. It is of course not known what strategic structures (i.e., games) dominated interactions in the evolutionary past of humans. Evolutionary models often uncritically assume some game, typically some kind of the prisoners’ dilemma, to investigate the effects of some other feature of the model. Here, another approach is suggested: What can be said about the likely strategic structure of interactions, given the features of human evolved psychology? The feature considered in this paper is ethnocentrism (also known as ingroup bias), which refers to the tendency to behave differently to different strangers simply depending on whether they seem to belong to the ingroup or the outgroup. Analysis and simulations of simple evolutionary models indicate that only some strategic structures are conducive to the evolution of ethnocentrism. In particular, this class does not contain the prisoners’ dilemma, but it does contain anti-coordination and coordination games, with socially optimal strategies being more frequent in ingroup interactions in the latter, especially if the other strategy is risk dominant, which applies to a class of games known as the stag hunt. This indicates that the strategic structure of coordination games, such as the stag hunt, and anti-coordination games, such as hawk-dove, may have been more common than games of cooperation and defection in human’s evolutionary past.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik -- Annan matematik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics -- Other Mathematics (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Mathematics/Applied Mathematics

matematik/tillämpad matematik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

ovr (ämneskategori)