User:Nick Gardner /Sandbox

Social capital is believed to come into being by the process termed emergence by which a complex interactive system can transform itself from chaos to order. The initial position is taken to be similar to the "state of nature" envisaged by Thomas Hobbes in which there is a constant "war of all against all". That condition is taken to be analagous to the prisoner's dilemma parable of games theory, in which both participants suffer unnecessarily because neither trusts the other. Emergence from that condition is taken to commence when the two protagonists interact repeatedly and arrive by trial and error at a mutually beneficial evolutionary stable strategy that once is established is likely to persist. Experiments with human participants have shown that mutually beneficial strategies involving trust do tend to emerge, and that their stability tends to be promoted by an urge to punish defectors.