Counterfactual Thinking (CT) is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. CT captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred; or, otherwise, to reason about an event that did occur but what would ensue had it not; or if another might have happened in its stead. Given the wide cognitive empowerment of CT in the human individual, the question arises of how the presence of individuals with CT-enabled improved strate- gies affects the evolution of cooperation in a population comprising individuals with diverse strategies. Here we propose a mathematical model, grounded on Evolutionary Game Theory, to examine the population dynamics emerging from the interplay between CT and Social Learning (SL) when individuals face cooperation dilemmas. Our results suggest that CT fosters coordination in collective action problems and has a limited impact in cooperation dilemmas where coordination is not required. Moreover, we show that, in coordina- tion dilemmas, a small prevalence of individuals resorting to CT is enough to nudge an entire population towards highly cooperative standards.
25/09/2019 13:00
Knowledge-Based Systems
Luís Moniz Pereira is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He is affiliated with its NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA-LINCS). Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) since 2001. Doctor honoris causa T.U. Dresden, 2006.Member of the Board of Trustees and Scientific Advisory Board of IMDEA, the Madrid Advanced Studies Software Institute, since 2006. Founding president of the Portuguese Artificial Intelligence Association (APPIA), 1984. His research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, logic programming, cognitive sciences, and evolutionary game theory. He was awarded the National Medal of Scientific Merit in 2019. More information, including awards and publications, at http://userweb.fct.unl.pt/~lmp/
Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16UVAkAreR-hLLxpfuL9Ireel6z4h1v7h/view?usp=sharing
Audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mt7gOU6dxWjAdZpUyiec1YN5S-gGQoa6/view?usp=sharing
