IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca,Wednesday, May 22nd- Friday, May 24th
Confirmed invited speakers:
Carlos Alós-Ferrer (University of Zurich)
Sarah Genon (Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine, Jülich)
Francesco Guala (University of Milan)
Marco Tamietto (University of Turin, University of Tilburg, University of Oxford)
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Panel “Theoretical insights on Society” (chair: Vernazzani), Friday, 24th May.
J. Marchetti, “Reintroducing Cognitive Institutionalism. Do Social and Cognitive Sciences together help us understand institutions?”
Understanding the nature of institutions and social norms is a challenge to which economists, philosophers, and social scientists have dedicated all their efforts. Recently, some scholars have tried to explore the cognitive mechanisms that help human decision-makers perform the myriad of coordination tasks that they face in their everyday lives.
In a 2004 paper by Douglass C. North, Chrysostomos Mantzavinos and Syed Shariq presented the Manifesto of “Cognitive Institutionalism” (CI). The goal of the team headed by the Nobel Prize-winner North is today considered the first attempt to discover the cognitive aspects that allow us to understand the way in which institutions operate in shaping actors’ behaviors. Opening up the black box of cognitive processes is the crucial novelty introduced by the CI (Mantzavinos 2015): a “cognitive” analysis of institutions consists of explaining, with the help of cognitive science and cognitive psychology, how actors are led to interpret certain phenomena (or sensory data) in the external world through their cognitive and learning processes, which allow them to build “mental models” and “beliefs”.
Because a unified cognitive institutional program does not yet exist, since its insights are still not yet fully explored, the first goal of my proposal is to reconstruct the guidelines of this program. I will show how it differs from Rational Choice Institutionalism (RCI), accepting some basic ideas of Friedrich A. von Hayek and Herbert Simon’s cognitive theory and improving them with the new discoveries of neurosciences and Theory of mind (ToM).
My second goal is to examine the notions of “mental models” and “beliefs” compared with their use in social sciences in order to explore what cognitive processes are involved in coordination mechanism of institutions. In particular, I try to integrate CI’s conclusions with recent approaches used in cognitive game theory, such as “solution thinking” (Morton 2003). While CI stressed the fact that common institutions need shared mental models, recent studies on focal points (Sugden & Zamarrón 2006; Guala & Hindricks 2015, Guala 2016 and others) have shown that it is possible to achieve an institutional framework without agents’ ability to represent reciprocal mental states or share the same beliefs. The way in which actors can coordinate themselves is made possible by the concept of “simulation” which sustains coordination generated by focal points through which each player try to replicate the reasoning of other players by using one’s own cognition and cultural background as a model.
REFERENCEES
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- Guala, F. (2016). Understanding Institutions: The Science And Philosophy Of Living Together, Princeton; Oxford : Princeton University Press.
- Guala, F. & Hindricks, F. (2015). “Institutions, rules, and equilibria: a unified theory”, Journal of Institutional Economics, vol. 11 issue 3, pp. 459-480.
- Mantzavinos, C. (2001). Individuals, Institutions, and Markets, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
- Mantzavinos, C. (2015). “Cognition, Institutions, and Social Change: A Conversation with Chrysostomos Mantzavinos”, Colombia Internacional 84 • COLINT 84, Mayo-agosto, pp. 219-226.
- Morton, A. (2003). The Importance Of Being Understood: Folk Psychology As Ethics, London : Routledge.
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