The Savanna Principle
I've been reading about the Savanna Principle (or one paper at least), which is the idea that the human brain is inherently biased towards not really understanding concepts that didn't exist back in the hunter-gatherer days in the African Savanna, known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA).


As the paper states it, the idea behind this comes from a couple of assumptions/generalisations:
1 - There isn't anything special about Homo Sapiens, we're "unique like every other species", in that our uniqueness evolved from our adaptation to our environment, back in the day
2 - There isn't anything special about the human brain compared to other body parts, in the way it evolved to fulfill a special function

Fundamentally, the human body hasn't changed in the last 10 000 years, so the idea is that the brain remains in pretty much the same state. This would be one explanation for why children take a reasonably long time to learn to distinguish people in real life to people on TV, and indeed, studies have shown that people never really do - those who watch certain types of TV shows (soaps and similar, I expect), rate themselves as having greater satisfaction with their social lives, as if they have those people as actual friends.


This relates to a lot of game theory experiments as people don't react the way game theory predicts during experiments.
One such experiment is where the players are given money each round for a number of rounds - they keep the money at the end of the game, though I assume it's relatively small amounts. They have the choice of just keeping it, or contributing some portion of it to the "common good", which means that the value of the contribution is doubled (for instance), and it is then redistributed equally to everyone playing the game. If you consider this, everyone will obviously be better off if everyone else contributes, but individually the best choice is just to keep your money each round because assuming there's more than 2 players then you get less money if you contribute.

Yet people contribute anyway. The argument of the Savanna Principle is that the concept of being completely anonymous and playing a one-off game is essentially not something that the brain ever had to deal with during the EEA, you'd have to deal with the same people every day, so "defecting" in the Prisoner's Dilemma game (which is what this essentially is) is just not natural, even when it's entirely logical. Naturally, this is good for society :)

Of course, not everyone contributes, and over time the people who do get fed up and start to just keep their money, so eventually we get what game theory might have expected to start with. The game gets more complex when you add in the option for people to "spend" money to punish people who don't cooperate (i.e. at the end of each round every player can spend $1 to cost another player $2 or whatever units are appropriate). Naturally punishing other players is even more "irrational" from a purely selfish viewpoint, but people will engage in this too, and sooner or later the vast majority are probably cooperating, so long as there are enough "punishers" in the initial population.

It's pretty interesting stuff, but that's enough typing for now, although I haven't done the topic justice. I'll have to read some more before I make up my mind as to whether it makes sense or whether it's a load of hogwash.