Brian Skyrms, The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure

(Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Reviewed by Herbert Gintis (revised July 2012)

Brian Skyrms is one of the few philosophers who have been elected to
the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. He is an
outstanding example of what seems to me to be a trend in modern
philosophy of science, which is to learn the relevant scientific practices
thoroughly so that one's contribution as a philosopher is at a high
technical level of expertise. This book is accessible to the interested nonprofessional, but the journal articles on which it is based are quite
sophisticated. I am not sure whether we should consider Skyrms' ideas
as contribution to social theory, social philosophy, or both. Then again,
perhaps it doesn't matter.
Skyrms' preferred method is to take a simple two-player game like the
stag hunt or the prisoner's dilemma and explore the implications of
repeating the game, playing it on a lattice, allowing player strategies to
evolve, and otherwise enriching the game's structure to better
approximate some forms of real social interaction. Skyrms is above all
an explorer rather than an exhaustive taxonomist. He wanders through
the forest of exotic plausible assumptions for two-person games, stops
here and there to admire a particularly interesting specimen, and the
moves on. This is a delightful approach for both the casual reader, who
is not interested in complex details, and the professional student of game
theory, who is tired of taking a highly specific game and absolutely
beating it to death with forays of analytical purity.
One serious limitation of this book is that Skyrms is almost singlemindedly concerned with two-player games, whereas understanding
human social life requires n-player games for fairly high n (at least 20 in
some important cases). While a deep understanding of two-person
games does shed light on behavior in larger games, it also can be very
misleading. Certainly human society is much more complicated than one

might infer from the workings of the prisoner's dilemma, the stag hunt,
and the hawk-dove game.

I also believe that Skyrms' major point in this book is just dead wrong.
In the Preface, Skyrms says "If one simple game is to be chosen as an
exemplar of the central problem of the social contract, which should it
be? Many modern thinkers have focused on the prisoner's dilemma, but I
believe that this emphasis is misplaced. The most appropriate choice is
not the prisoner's dilemma, but rather the stag hunt." (p. xii) Now, the
stag hunt is a pure coordination game of the following form. Suppose
there are n players (Skyrms prefers two players, but any n will do). If all
players "hunt stag," each will receive an payoff of 1000 calories of meat.
However, if any player decides instead to "hunt rabbit," the stag hunt
will fail, and all players will get no calories except the rabbit hunter,
who gets 100 calories. This is a coordination game, or an assurance
game, because a player can be assured of getting 100 calories no matter
what the others do (by hunting rabbit), but if the players can coordinate
so all hunt stag, they will all do much better.
Skyrms defends his statement that human social life is basically a stag
hunt-like coordination game as follows. At first sight, social cooperation
seems to be a prisoner's dilemma, or in the n-player case, a public goods
game. In this game, by cooperating an individual helps all the other
members of the group, but at a cost to himself. Therefore, a selfregarding player will never cooperate. It follows that social cooperation
requires altruistic players---people must cooperate even though this is
personally costly and the others alone benefit from one's prosocial
behavior. It is easy to see why the public goods game is an allegory for
social cooperation among humans. For instance, if we all hunt, if
hunting is dangerous and exhausting, and we must share the kill equally,
then a self-regarding hunter will prefer to shirk rather than hunt.
Cooperation in this case requires altruistic hunters. Skyrms' point,
however, is that if the game is repeated indefinitely, then cooperation
among self-regarding agents is possible using what are known as

"trigger strategies." A trigger strategy for a player is to cooperate on

every round, as long as all other players cooperate as well. However, the
first time one player defects, the trigger strategy dictates that all players
defect on every succeeding round. It is easy to see that in this case, even
selfish players will cooperate on all rounds, because the gains they have
from defecting on one rounds may be swamped by the losses incurred by
not benefiting from others' efforts on the succeeding rounds.
Why is Skyrms wrong? Note first that the repeated prisoner's dilemma
or n-player public goods game (the latter is just a prisoner's dilemma
with n players) is not really a stag hunt game at all. The stag hunt game
has exactly two equilibria, one where everyone hunts rabbit and one
where everyone hunts stag. The repeated public goods game (repeated
public goods game) has an infinite number of equilibria! For instance,
suppose it costs 100 calories to generate 1000 calories for the other
players. Now suppose in a ten player repeated public goods game, all
players cooperate on all rounds, except player 1, who defects on all
rounds. With an obvious alteration in the trigger strategies of players 2
through n, we still have a Nash equilibrium of the repeated public goods
game. This is because 9,000 calories are generated in each period, so
each player gets 900 calories, and players 2 through 10 only expend 100
calories, so they have a net gain of 800 calories and hence are willing to
participate. Now, by varying who participates and how much, we can
generate an infinite number of equilibria for the repeated public goods
game. In game theory, this is known as the Folk Theorem of Repeated
Games.

Despite the fact that the stag hunt is not exactly the same as the repeated
public goods game, Skyrms would be correct in principle if it were true
that the repeated public goods game were a coordination game, like the
stag hunt. But the repeated public goods game is NOT a coordination
game at all! In fact, in the repeated public goods game, a self-regarding
player has an incentive to shirk if he can get away with it; i.e., if others
do not observe his shirking. This is not the case in the stag hunt.

Economists generally treat the Folk Theorem as a brilliant solution to the

problem of cooperation among many self-regarding agents, and Skyrms
is here merely following their lead. My study of the Folk Theorem, by
contrast, shows that the Folk Theorem is no solution at all, except for
groups of size two, or larger groups under generally implausible
informational conditions (see my book, The Bounds of Reason,
Princeton University Press, 2009). The reasons is that cooperation in the
repeated public goods game requires that each player send a very
accurate signal to each other player indicating cooperation or defection,
and the same signal must be transmitted to all players if they are to
coordinate in their manner of reacting to a defection. When different
players get different signals (e.g., when each player sees only a subset of
the other players) and/or when the signals have a significant probability
of being inaccurate (e.g., a hunter worked hard but by chance failed to
be successful in the hunt), the cooperative equilibrium to the repeated
public goods game will not exist, or will exist but will be extremely
inefficient.
The implication of Skyrms' position for social theory is quite dramatic.
If he were correct, it would follow that humans could cooperate very
effectively even if they were perfectly self-regarding, with absolutely no
need for altruistic preferences, empathy, no predisposition for
cooperating and sharing, nor any other prosocial behavior that goes
beyond simple mutualism: An individual would help the group only as a
byproduct of helping himself. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence
that humans have fundamental other-regarding preferences, including a
predisposition to follow legitimate social norms, and to make personal
sacrifices on behalf of the group if they perceive that others are make
such sacrifices as well.
My reading of the empirical evidence is that humans have evolved a
cognitive psychology that allows for "team cognition." This is analyzed
in the writings of Michael Bacharach, Robert Sugden, Natalie Gold,
Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and
others. Team cognition means that humans can understand that they are
part of a team, that all team members have the same team goal, and that

other members also realize this. Most animals completely lack this form
of cognition, or have it only to a severely limited degree. The writings of
Michael Tomasello offer, to my mind, the most persuasive evidence on
team cognition.
However team cognition is about cognition and not motivation.
Moreover, it has nothing whatever to do with the stag hunt except in
very small groups. In groups of several agents, even with team
cognition, it will usually be the case that one of the group can defect and
the project will still be worth doing, and hence will benefit the defector.
Thus, team cognition will generally be embedded in games of the public
goods type, for which altruistic motivation is required for success. This
altruistic motivation is a social psychology that leads individuals to
cooperate with others even when there is a personal cost, so long as
others are doing the same. This implies that to sustain cooperation in a
social group, we need a lot more than to simply coordinate on the highyield strategy. We need a social system that fosters a sense of morality
that includes caring about others and sacrificing on behalf of society.
When that morality is absent or in disrepair, life will be "poore, nasty,
brutish, and short," to use Thomas Hobbes' famous words.