The Cognitive and Communicative Demands of Cooperation

I argue that the analysis of different kinds of cooperation will benefit from an account of the cognitive and communicative functions required for that cooperation. I review different models of cooperation in game theory—reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, cooperation about future goals, and conventions—with respect to their cognitive and communicative prerequisites. The cognitive factors considered include recognition of individuals, memory capacity, temporal discounting, prospective cognition, and theory of mind. Whereas many forms of cooperation require no communication or just simple communication, more advanced forms that are unique to humans presuppose full symbolic communication. 1.1 The span of cooperation in game theory The evolution of cooperation remains an enigma. In surprisingly many situations, bothanimals and humans fail to behave as predicted by game theory. For example, humans cooperate more in prisoner’s dilemma games than would be expected from logical analysis. Several explanations for this mismatch have been suggested, ranging from the claim that animals and humans are not fully rational to the claim that the kind of rationality presumed in classical game theory is not relevant to evolutionary arguments. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that the behavior of various agents must be judged in relation to their cognitive and communicative capacities. In my opinion, these factors have not been sufficiently considered in game theory. There are many ways of defining cooperation. A broad definition is that it consists of joint actions that confer mutual benefits.1 Peter Gärdenfors Lund University Cognitive Science, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] 1 A stronger criterion, focused on human cooperation, is formulated by Bowles and Gintis [8]: “An individual behavior that incurs personal costs in order to engage in a joint activity that confers ben-