AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN THE EMERGENCE AND MAINTENANCEOF HUMAN COOPERATION

摘要

While the emergence of Language may have been promoted by a myriad ofdifferent factors, it seems intuitively obvious that some level of cooperationamong humans was necessary. Desalles (2000) argues that cooperation itselfwas the decisive factor for language emergence while Knight (2006), suggeststhat any human cooperation requires contracts, the very contracts upon whichsociety is based. Jeffreys (2006) presented experimental findings showing thatcooporation on a social dilemma task required language and that once languagewas used, players often made altruistic sacrifices. The present experiment seeksto further explore some of these contentions.