Empathy and Game Theory, how civilizations come to be.
https://theconversation.com/empathy-is-the-secret-ingredient-that-makes-cooperation-and-civilization-possible-115105
This article explores a branch of game theory, something which we has discussed in class, named evolutionary game theory, which is game theory applied to evolving populations in biology, basically the modeling of Darwinistic competition. What this article is about is the evolution of cooperation within societies, what makes our present societies so cooperative. To test this, researchers modeled societies with a reputation based system, in other words how each participant in this society view another as good or bad, and gave them a percentage based on how many subjects cooperated with one another. In one model, reputation was based on institutions assigning reputations to individuals and in other based on how individuals saw one another. In the first model cooperation was extremely common, especially in societies with social norms such as “stern judging”, however in the second model cooperation was extremely uncommon, especially use these social norms, differing viewsets on individuals led to “worse” outcomes.
However, with the addition to empathy to these models, cooperation skyrocketed. Because people now considered other people’s perspective on another person, including the person as well, they were more apt to cooperate, which made the models almost resemble the cooperative societies we have now. Overall in these models, each participant and another participant played a game with two strategies, as in our discussions of game theory, where the choices were whether they saw the other as good or bad and only in choices where both saw each other as good would there be any cooperation. With empathy this changes such that the outcomes are more willing to cooperate based on changing perspectives. Overall, this article brings in to light the power of empathy and why game theory can’t fully map out outcomes when there are other aspects to how people interact with one another.