The psychology of coordination and common knowledge.

By Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DeScioli, Omar S. Haque, Steven Pinker. 2014

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination. Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice. Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcast over a loudspeaker) than when they had only shared knowledge (conveyed to both by a messenger) or private knowledge (revealed to each partner separately). These results support the hypothesis that people represent common knowledge as a distinct cognitive category that licenses them to coordinate with others for mutual gain. We discuss how this hypothesis can provide a unified explanation for diverse phenomena in human social life, including recursive mentalizing, performative speech acts, public protests, hypocrisy, and self-conscious emotional expressions.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Multi-Agent Common Knowledge Reinforcement Learning (2018, background): “Thomas et al. (2014) explore the psychology of common knowledge and coordination.”
Validity and Mechanical Turk: An assessment of exclusion methods and interactive experiments (2017, background): “We also found no significant differences for four of the Big Five personality traits in the Thomas et al. (2014) dataset, but we did find that participants who were excluded were slightly more Extraverted (t(799) ¼ 2.03, p ¼ .043, d¼ .14), which is especially notable because other studies reviewed…”
Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate Politics (2017, background): “48 To this effect, Thomas et al. (2014) argue that an understanding of the distribution of groups beliefs (e.g. common knowledge) is a psychological precursor for costly coordination behaviors; when individuals had knowledge about the other individuals incentives and behaviors, they were more willin”