The need for special inferential rules for cheater detection derives from the fact that standard, domain-general conditional reasoning rules will fail to identify cheaters in many circumstances, and will misidentify reciprocators and altruists as cheaters in others.#
The computational problems our ancestors faced were not drawn randomly from the universe of all possible problems; instead, they were densely clustered in particular, recurrent families (e.g., predator avoidance, foraging, mating) that occupy only miniscule regions of the space of possible problems.#
General-purpose reasoning methods are very weak, and have crippling defects (e.g., combinatorial explosion) that are a direct consequence of their domain generality.#
Sufficiently large collective actions decouple reward from effort, initiating a process of declining effort by some, which stimulates matching withdrawal by others. This free riding and the dwindling participation it engenders intensify punitive sentiments toward undercontributors, culminating in social systems organized around coercion and punishment (where rulers can deploy it) or culminating in dissolution (where they cannot).#
From the point of view of an individual involved in one project, others with diverging projects (and different views and values) appear to be free riders with respect to one’s favored enterprises.#
Among hunter–gatherers, coalitional cooperation among nonkin most commonly occurs in two contexts: cooperative hunting and intergroup aggression (small-scale warfare). Most other labor is pursued in other ways.#
Human nature is not inherently good or bad: it is, “inherently,” a collection of programs, which execute their functions. The real question is: Which programs reliably develop in the human mind, and how do they process information?#
Political debate in the present is often a struggle over how to characterize events in terms of ancestral situation-types, because alternative framings trigger different evolved moral heuristics.#