Overview
Description
Explores the millennia-long evolution of human cooperation, including why we cooperate, how conflicts arise, are avoided, and resolved.
Units
Lecture3
Catalog Details
Offering
Offered: Every Fall - Even Years
Terms
fall
Attributes
Standard
Learning Outcomes
- describe the evolution of cooperation in human society.
- distinguish between biological and social bases of cooperation.
- contrast ethical and biological bases for cooperation and conflict.
- analyze the circumstances in which either cooperation or conflict emerge.
- explain social, political, and ethical structures that encourage cooperation and minimize cooperation.
- compare and contrast the how social and political institutions succeed in promoting cooperation and reducing conflict.
- synthesize a multidisciplinarily diverse corpus of scholarly research on the evolution of cooperation.
- apply theories of cooperation and conflict to a novel research design based on a behavioral experiment.
- understand the inherent tension between individual and group-based interests, and the inherent challenge for prosocial behaviors to evolve by natural selection.
- use theories of cooperation and empirical evidence to illuminate the roles cultural patterns, norms, and other social institutions play in supporting cooperation within and between communities.
- assess their own ethical values in the context of social cooperation.
- identify and analyze ethical frameworks as solutions to specific challenges emerging from the conflict of individual and group interests.