Convenors: Wolfgang Spohn (Konstanz), Mantas Radzvilas (Konstanz)

Social reality is built on the capacity of human beings to engage in social behavior – complex forms of intentional, coordinated actions of multiple individuals. In some cases, peoples’ willingness to engage in such behavior can be explained by their self-oriented interest in advancing their personal goals. In other cases, their engagement in such behavior seems to go against their personal interests, necessitating explanations that delve into motivationally relevant factors beyond those to be straightforwardly reduced to narrowly defined individual interests.

Game theory has served as a dominant conceptual framework for developing theories aiming to explain social behavior, resulting in a number of game-theoretic accounts. Despite their differences, these theories converge on the idea that social behavior is sustained by shared expectations among interacting individuals regarding each other’s actions and their sufficiently aligned valuations of the consequences of combined actions. The divergence among these accounts lies in their explanations of how these shared expectations and valuations emerge. Main competitors are social norm theories, prosocial preference theories, team reasoning theory, and virtual bargaining theory.

Such accounts are pursued within game theory, philosophy, economics, and cognitive psychology. The aim of the conference is to bring scholars from these disciplines into an intense exchange about the status of these accounts of social behavior.