In a series of papers, Forber and Smead :151–166, 2014, Biol Philos 30:405–421, 2015) and Smead and Forber :698–707, 2013) make a valuable contribution to the study of cooperation in finite populations by analyzing an understudied model: the prisoner’s delight. It always pays to cooperate in the one-shot prisoner’s delight, so this model presents a best-case scenario for the evolution of cooperation. Yet, what Forber and Smead find is highly counterintuitive. In finite populations playing the prisoner’s delight, increasing the benefit (...) of cooperation causes selection to favor defection. Here, I extend their model by considering the effects of non-linear payoffs. In particular, I show that interesting subtleties arise when payoffs are synergistic. Indeed, analysis reveals that increasing the benefit of cooperation does not always favor the spread of defection if payoffs are synergistic. I conclude by drawing some general considerations about robustness analysis in evolutionary models. (shrink)

Recently, both evolutionary anthropologists and some philosophers have argued that cooperative social settings unique to humans play an important role in the development of both our cognitive capacities and what Michael Tomasello terms the “construction” of “normative rationality” or “a normative point of view as a self-regulating mechanism.” In this article, I use evolutionary game theory to evaluate the plausibility of the claim that cooperation fosters epistemic rationality. Employing an extension of signal-receiver games that I term “telephone games,” I show (...) that cooperative contexts work as advertised: under plausible conditions, these scenarios favor epistemically rational agents over irrational ones designed to do just as well as them in non-interactive contexts. I then show that the basic results are strengthened by introducing complications that make the game more realistic. (shrink)