The Coordination Game

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Aphysisis would say it's an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking, because it didn't matter whether we picked left or right. But picking the same one for everybody is definitely advantageous, right? Exactly. And so you can ask, you know, why in certain societies, or how do we break this symmetry and come to different conventions where we all do something that helps us coordinate our behaviour? It could have been something else. There are lots of other things we can do in some situations. In this case, there are just two options. But if we look at, say, what time we start work in the morning, there's actually a lot of options we might have had.

You can’t always get what you want, as a wise person once said. But we do try, even when someone else wants the same thing. Our lives as people, and the evolution of other animals over time, are shaped by competition for scarce resources of various kinds. Game theory provides a natural framework for understanding strategies and behaviors in these competitive settings, and thus provides a lens with which to analyze evolution and human behavior, up to and including why racial or gender groups are consistently discriminated against in society. Cailin O’Connor is the author or two recent books on these issues: Games in the Philosophy of Biology and The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution.

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Cailin O’Connor received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at UCI. Her works involves questions in the philosophy of biology and behavioral science, game theory, agent-based modeling, social epistemology, decision theory, rational choice, and the spread of misinformation.

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