This Strategic Symposium will bring together members of two TECT CRPs (SOCCOP, DynCoopNet) and representatives of other TECT projects and local researchers interested on temporal aspects of social and mental dynamics of cooperation.
Members of the SOCCOP and DynCoopNet projects will present ideas on the evolution of cooperation over time, since the late Pleistocene and early Holocene up to today. The SOCCOP groups focuses on unravelling rules that govern the evolution of human cooperative behaviour together with their social and genetic causes. The DynCoopNet team focuses on issues about the measurement and analysis of cooperation mechanisms to study their enforcement, and what distinguishes situations in which trust and cooperation build from those in which cooperation breaks down or never develops. Both groups embrace complementary temporal frameworks. SOCCOP researchers study our distant-past human ancestors and current human societies, while DynCoopNet focuses on self-organizing, cooperative trade networks in the first global age (1400-1800). It is somewhat surprising that these ideas have never been put together in an attempt to build a whole picture of how cooperative behaviours have evolved and changed along history and how these processes of change have shaped extant human variability in cooperation and trade-related traits.
Bringing members of these teams together, in conjunction with local, internationally renowned, researchers in the fields of experimental economics, games theory and evolutionary biology will constitute a crucial step towards the first comprehensive exploration of the evolution of cooperative behaviours across all human history.
