TY - JOUR
T1 - Globalization and the rise and fall of cognitive control
AU - Mosleh, Mohsen
AU - Kyker, Katelynn
AU - Cohen, Jonathan D.
AU - Rand, David G.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative of the Miami Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - The scale of human interaction is larger than ever before—people regularly interact with and learn from others around the world, and everyone impacts the global environment. We develop an evolutionary game theory model to ask how the scale of interaction affects the evolution of cognition. Our agents make decisions using automatic (e.g., reflexive) versus controlled (e.g., deliberative) cognition, interact with each other, and influence the environment (i.e., game payoffs). We find that globalized direct contact between agents can either favor or disfavor control, depending on whether controlled agents are harmed or helped by contact with automatic agents; globalized environment disfavors cognitive control, while also promoting strategic diversity and fostering mesoscale communities of more versus less controlled agents; and globalized learning destroys mesoscale communities and homogenizes the population. These results emphasize the importance of the scale of interaction for the evolution of cognition, and help shed light on modern challenges.
AB - The scale of human interaction is larger than ever before—people regularly interact with and learn from others around the world, and everyone impacts the global environment. We develop an evolutionary game theory model to ask how the scale of interaction affects the evolution of cognition. Our agents make decisions using automatic (e.g., reflexive) versus controlled (e.g., deliberative) cognition, interact with each other, and influence the environment (i.e., game payoffs). We find that globalized direct contact between agents can either favor or disfavor control, depending on whether controlled agents are harmed or helped by contact with automatic agents; globalized environment disfavors cognitive control, while also promoting strategic diversity and fostering mesoscale communities of more versus less controlled agents; and globalized learning destroys mesoscale communities and homogenizes the population. These results emphasize the importance of the scale of interaction for the evolution of cognition, and help shed light on modern challenges.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-020-16850-0
DO - 10.1038/s41467-020-16850-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 32555322
AN - SCOPUS:85086693891
VL - 11
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
SN - 2041-1723
IS - 1
M1 - 3099
ER -