The evolution of political intelligence: Simulation results

Abstract

Several bodies of theory develop the idea that the intelligence of highly social animals - most interestingly, humans - is significantly organized around the adaptive problems posed by their sociality. By this 'political intelligence' hypothesis, sociality selects for, among other attributes, capacities for 'manipulating' information others can gather about one's own future behaviour, and for 'mindreading' such manipulations by others. Yet we have little theory about how diverse parameters of the games that social animals play select for political intelligence. We begin to address that with an evolutionary simulation in which agents choose between playing Prisoner's Dilemma and Hawk-Dove gam..