Two-Person Cooperative Games

Abstract

The dilemma generated by the bifurcation of ‘rationality’ into individual and collective rationality vanishes, once collective rationality is regarded as the basis of rational decision-making by two or more actors. Psychologically, this paradigm reflects at least a partial fusion of the players’ consciousnesses. We can surmise that to the extent that it makes sense to speak of consciousness of non-humans, this fusion is complete in social insects, for example. Possibly such a fusion takes place in mammals, animals known to behave ‘altruistically’ toward their young and toward kin, sometimes even toward non-kin of their species. In human beings, we sometimes experience this partial fusion directly and call it ‘empathy’. Empathy manifests itself in the anguish we sometimes feel when we witness the suffering of another.