Unravelling into war: trust and social preferences in Hobbes’s state of nature

Abstract

According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.

Formal models in normative political theory

“…For instance, Chung's model—which we discussed in Section 2—explicitly assumes there are two different types of players; indeed, Chung shows that it is uncertainty over other players’ type that drives conflict. Chung's model of the state of nature along with other more recent ones (e.g., Vanderschraaf 2006; Schaefer and Sohn 2022) are superior to the prior generation of models because their assumptions better align with the original text.…”

“…Vanderschraaf (2006) assumes an infinite type space and shows via computer simulations that a very small number of vainglorious types can invade a population consisting mostly of modest types and generate universal war after only a couple rounds of repeated play. Schaefer and Sohn (2022) also assume an infinite type space and further assume that the modest types and vainglorious types have 'social preferences' (where each type cares about how much material resources they have relative to other players) and show that an arbitrarily small proportion of vainglorious types will spark a chain-reaction that 'unravels' the state of nature into a state of war. 6.…”

“… 5. For other formal models of Hobbes’s state of nature, see Vanderschraaf (2006) and Schaefer and Sohn (2022). Vanderschraaf (2006) assumes an infinite type space and shows via computer simulations that a very small number of vainglorious types can invade a population consisting mostly of modest types and generate universal war after only a couple rounds of repeated play.…”