The course is devoted to understanding how people behave in their social environment, focusing on the co-evolution of behaviors and social arrangements like institutions, culture, norms. The contents of the course are divided in two parts: Part 1 is methodological, introducing tools for evolutionary analysis; Part 2 is thematic, applying tools to specific issues.
A full reading list will be available online at the beginning of the course. The list will consist of journal papers and book chapters.
Learning Objectives
At the end of the course students are expected to be able to apply the evolutionary approach to understanding behavioral social phenomena.
Prerequisites
No previous knowledge is required.
Teaching Methods
Lectures, seminars and discussions.
Further information
All the material, including the lecture handouts, will be freely accessible to the students of the course. Students are invited to ask references and additional material to deepen topics of interest to them.
Type of Assessment
- Homework (1/3): exercises to be done at home, delivered and discussed;
- Survey paper (2/3): written and presented, individual work.
Course program
Part 1 - Tools:
- Evolutionary game theory: evolutionary stability, ecological dynamics, replicator dynamics;
- Learning: reinforcement learning, imitation, myopic best response;
- Long-run equilibria: mistakes/experimentation allow transitions across equilibria, making some of them more prominent than others.
Part 2 - Themes:
- Cognition: evolution of learning rules, deliberation and intuition;
- Cooperation: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, group competition, punishment;
- Coordination and social norms: stag hunt game, battle of the sexes; moral rules, empirical expectations, normative expectations;
- Social preferences and morality: homo economicus, homo socialis, homo moralis, homo parochialis, homo universalis;
- Conflict, institutions and power: conflict (hawk-dove game), property rights (hawk-dove-bourgeois game), hegemony vs. balance of power.