This research project studies the evolution of cognitive capacities for human agents and the implications for strategic behavior in potentially cooperative social interactions. The research starts from the idea that people are political beings with special purpose information processing capacities for dealing with cooperative and conflictual encounters. The baseline environment for these interactions is taken from evolutionary game theory in which individuals are randomly matched to play a variety of 2-person games, including prisoner's dilemma, games of pure conflict and cooperative games. What is new and different in this research is that an actor's strategy is contingent on the counterpart's characteristics (e.g., strength or frequency of cooperative behavior). Moreover actors have a capacity to verify or misrepresent their own characteristics. The communication and cognitive abilities of those actors are subject to evolutionary selection. All of this activity takes place in well defined computer simulations that run through tens of thousands of generations with large groups of individuals. The results illustrate the conditions under which cooperation can emerge in a variety of environments.
