Individual Decision Making and the Evolutionary Roots of Institutions
Individual Decision Making and the Evolutionary Roots of Institutions
The whale kill, or grindadrápin the Faroese language, is an example of what many call an “institution”—a term that is used in various ways across the human sciences. This chapter looks at institutions (i.e., locally stable, widely shared rules that regulate social interaction), outlines the mechanisms that connect individuals to large-scale institutions, and discusses the design of individual decision making. If institutions regulate behavior, then presumably the mechanisms that have evolved to produce individual behavior will be relevant to the broader enterprise of integrating these two scales of explanation. Ways in which institutions may have evolved are explored, both as a result of individual decision making and as a result of processes distinct from those that govern individual behavior.
Keywords: Strüngmann Forum Reports, cultural evolution, decision making, deliberative decisions, evolution of institutions, institutional designdesign of institutions
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