Is There a Cultural Transmission of Successful Behavior?

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M, there are different possible driving behaviors. Some people might try out the right side or the left side. We'd want to be thinking about like way back when cars were first being used on roads. And so you say, ok, next generation, the ones who did well in these strategic interactions, are going to have more offspring. There's goig o be more of that kind of behavior in the population. That will determine a kind of evolutionary trajectory towards increasing ... strategies that do well.

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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