Institutions Evolving Through the Mind. A Cognitive and Computational Approach

In this paper, institutions are said to undergo evolutionary processes of a peculiar nature. Cognitive activities and representations affect institutional change, and play a decisive role in their selection and retention. Special attention is devoted to enforcing institutions that are hypothesized to have evolved from retaliatory to punishing, and even sanctioning, systems thanks to and by means of specific cognitive capacities. In this paper, we propose a simulation-based methodology in which artificial agents are modelled and observed to interact in a virtual setting, the simulated world, in order to experiment upon the conditions favouring institutional evolution.