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Game Theory and Morality

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The Evolution of Morality

Part of the book series: Evolutionary Psychology ((EVOLPSYCH))

Abstract

Why do we think it’s wrong to treat people merely as a means to end? Why do we consider lies of omission less immoral than lies of commission? Why do we consider it good to give, regardless of whether the gift is effective? We use four simple game theoretic models—the Coordination Game, the Hawk–Dove game, Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the Envelope Game—to shed light on these and other puzzling aspects of human morality. We also justify the use of game theory for the study of morality and explore implications for group selection and moral realism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that we focus on the concept of Nash equilibrium in this chapter and not evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), a refinement of Nash that might be more familiar to an evolutionary audience. ESS are the Nash equilibria that are most relevant in evolutionary contexts. However, ESS is not well defined in many of our games, so we will focus on the insights garnered from Nash and directly discuss evolutionary dynamics when appropriate.

  2. 2.

    Technically, the conditions under which we expect players to avoid looking and attend to looking are c h > a/(1 − w) > c l p + c h(1 − p) and bp + d(1 − p) < 0), where c h and c l are the magnitudes of the high and low temptations, respectively; p is the likelihood of the low temptation; a/(1 − w) is the value of a repeated, cooperative interaction to player 1; and bp + d(1 − p) is the expected payoff to player 2 if player 1 only cooperates when the temptation is low.

  3. 3.

    The simulations employ numerical estimation of the replicator dynamics for a limited strategy space: cooperate without looking, cooperate with looking, look and cooperate only when the temptation is low, and always defect for player 1, and end if player 1 looks, end if player 1 defects, and always end for player 2.

  4. 4.

    In fact, even if one knows that others know that the transgression was intended, omission will still be judged as less wrong, since the transgression still won’t create what game theorists call common p-belief, which is required for an event to influence behavior in a game with multiple equilibria.

  5. 5.

    This is where the assumption of a uniform distribution comes in. Had we instead assumed, for instance, that the continuous variable is normally distributed, then it would not be exactly 50–50 but would deviate slightly depending on the standard deviation and the location of the threshold. Nevertheless, the upcoming logic will still go through for most Coordination Games, i.e. any Coordination Game with risk dominance not too close to .5.

  6. 6.

    As with omission, this follows from iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies (see Hoffman et al., 2015, for details).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, One Brattle Square, Suite 6, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Moshe Hoffman & Erez Yoeli

  2. Department of Psychology, and, the Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Carlos David Navarrete

Authors
  1. Moshe Hoffman
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  2. Erez Yoeli
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  3. Carlos David Navarrete
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Correspondence to Moshe Hoffman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  2. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Ranald D. Hansen

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Hoffman, M., Yoeli, E., Navarrete, C.D. (2016). Game Theory and Morality. In: Shackelford, T., Hansen, R. (eds) The Evolution of Morality. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19671-8_14

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