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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Storage For Good Times And Bad: Of Rats And Men, Ted Bergstrom
Storage For Good Times And Bad: Of Rats And Men, Ted Bergstrom
Ted C Bergstrom
How do rats and squirrels decide how much to hoard for the winter when they do not know how long the winter will be? This paper argues that natural selection is likely to result in random differences in the attitudes toward systemic risk by genetically identical individuals.
How Altruism Can Prevail In An Evolutionary Environment, Ted Bergstrom, Oded Stark
How Altruism Can Prevail In An Evolutionary Environment, Ted Bergstrom, Oded Stark
Ted C Bergstrom
This paper considers a series of examples in which evolution supports cooperative behavior in single-shot prisoners' dilemma. Examples include genetic inheritance for asexual siblings and for sexual diploid siblings. We also study two models of ``cultural inheritance''; one in which siblings copy either their parents or an extrafamilial role model and one in which neighbors arrayed along a circular road copy successful neighbors. Finally, we consider a model in which parents choose their behavior, realizing that it may be imitated by their children. A unifying principle of these models is that cooperative behavior more is likely to be sustained in …