Behavioral and Brain Sciences



Open Peer Commentary

Distinctive human social motivations in a game-theoretic framework


Don Ross a1a2
a1 Departments of Philosophy and Economics and Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences, University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL 35294
a2 School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa dross@commerce.uct.ac.za http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/Economics/staff/dross/default.asp

Abstract

I discuss implications of Tomasello et al's hypothesis that humans exhibit distinctive collective intentionality for game-theoretic approaches to modeling human evolution. Representing the hypothesis game-theoretically forces a question about whether it implies only distinctively human motivations or both distinctive motivations and distinctive cognitive capacities for representation of intentions. I also note that the hypothesis explains uniquely human ideological conflict and invites game-theoretic modeling of this.