Globalization and the rise and fall of cognitive control
Name
s41467-020-16850-0.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.5 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
98db7d030c575c0d83924d9a801f2628
Author(s)
Mosleh, Mohsen
Kyker, Katelynn
Cohen, Jonathan D.
Rand, David Gertler
Date Issued
June 2020
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Mosleh, Mohsen et al. "Globalization and the rise and fall of cognitive control." 11, 1 (June 2020): 3099 © 2020 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
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.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16850-0
