Globalization and the Rise and Fall of Cognitive Control

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2020 Jun 20

PMID 32555322

Citations 2

Authors

Mohsen Mosleh

Katelynn Kyker

Jonathan D Cohen

David G Rand

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

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.

Citing Articles

Assortativity in cognition.

Bilancini E, Boncinelli L, Vicario E Sci Rep. 2023; 13(1):3412.

PMID: 36854880 PMC: 9974973. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-30301-y.

Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on Twitter.

Mosleh M, Pennycook G, Arechar A, Rand D Nat Commun. 2021; 12(1):921.

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