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Game theory provides a useful framework for conceptualizing social decisions in which one person’s behavior affects outcomes that matter to other individuals. Game theory can also help us understand the computational problems inherent in social decision making. To explain human adaptive success, culture plays an important role. Models from population biology are used to explain (a) culture as a dynamic process, (b) the role of psychological mechanisms in enabling cumulative cultural evolution, and (c) teaching as an evolved phenomenon. How game theoretic approaches can be integrated with algorithmic-level processes remains, however, to be resolved. Difficulties lie in how cognitive and social psychologists approach the study of cognition as well as in how existing data are used to interpret human (and nonhuman) decision making.

Over the last decade much progress has been made in the study of social decision making. From economics and game theory, tasks have been defined to study the strategic interaction involving trust (the investment/trust game) and negotiation (the ultimatum game). From cognitive neuroscience and neuroeconomics, areas of the brain have been identified that allow individuals to share affective (empathy) or abstract mental (ToM) states. Activities in these areas of the brain are also found to be correlated with the strategies that people use in the economic games. Current research hopes to explain general principles of cortical computation that can explain the role of shared mental content in shaping the strategic decisions of interacting players.

This book has illustrated the advantages and drawbacks of chance and randomized social decision-making, claiming that arguments concerning such decision-making more often than not require qualification. Detailed scrutiny of randomized legal decision-making compels us to confront difficult, sometimes uncomfortable, questions concerning the role of reason in law and how we conceptualize justice. Although we are often understandably wary of resorting to lotteries to determine outcomes of legal significance, the idea that randomization might be employed more extensively within legal decision-making contexts ought not to be dismissed cursorily. Rigid application of some particular decision-making criterion to settle disputes might render adjudication less fraught with complexity and ambiguity. Depending on the criterion used, such application might even make the process of adjudication less partial. If the criterion is easy to apply, moreover, the costs of decision-making are likely to be reduced. One criterion which offers all of these qualities is random selection.

This chapter focuses on the neurocognitive development of social decision making. It presents evidence that the development of social decision making is related to changes in different, but interacting, brain networks. The chapter suggests that structural changes in brain development during adolescence are linked to changes in brain networks, and that these changes lead to the development of adolescent social behavior.

While the lottery has never been adopted as a general social decision-making tool, it has, in the past, been used to resolve a fairly wide variety of matters. Yet, today, to seriously entertain the prospect of extensive social decision-making by resort to lot (and hence, chance) would probably strike most people as absurd. The outcome of casting lots was once regarded not as random but as the revelation of divine intent. While divination by lot can be traced back at least as far as the ninth century BC, it would be wrong to regard the practice as wholly archaic. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, lotteries were regarded in medieval times as a means of getting God to speak. It may sometimes be the case that refusal to entertain the possibility of political and legal decision-making by resort to randomization betrays not human rationality but quite the opposite. Reluctance to use lotteries for political purposes such as elections is understandable, but misplaced. There are many arguments which might be advanced in support of randomness in political selection.

This chapter describes several novel lines of research, which have focused on social decision-making and perspective taking across childhood and adolescent development using experimental games. It summarizes results from developmental studies using variations of the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Trust Game. A special focus is given to the way cognitive control and perspective taking are implicated in social decision-making, and how these skills develop across adolescence. In addition, it describes insights from cognitive neuroscience studies concentrating on the role of brain regions important for cognitive control and perspective taking, in social decision-making in children, adolescents and adults. Together, the studies demonstrate a consistent pattern of both increasing strategic motivations and other-oriented concerns in social decision-making across development. The combination of brain and behavior measures has the advantage of allowing for a deeper understanding of the separable processes involved in the emergence of advanced forms of social decision-making.

Chance offers no guarantee that one will get the outcome that one desires. Just as we can be its beneficiaries, so too we may be its victims. Luck rests at the foundation of our moral judgements: the actions on which we are judged emerge from a world which we do not control. The notion of ‘moral luck’ is especially unnerving because there seems to be something in our conception of morality that arouses opposition to the idea that moral responsibility, or moral merit, or moral blame, should be subject to luck. Chance is an integral, ineradicable feature of law. Just as in other areas of life, being a beneficiary or a victim of the legal system will often be a matter of luck. This book articles the main problems associated with legal decision-making and shows that these problems may be overstated. This book considers what sort of case might be made for the use of lotteries in legal and social decision-making contexts.

Within the literature of legal philosophy, the idea of deciding by lot to dispense justice is almost wholly insignificant. It is a quirky idea that sometimes serves as a foil for those endeavouring to develop themes which are considered far more compelling and enlightening. At other times, the notion of deciding by lot is given the most cursory of treatments — examined and packed away within, say, the space of a footnote. Lotteries take many forms. They may be constructed or natural. They may be simple or complex. They may accord even chances or they may be (deliberately or naturally) biased. They may operate in isolation or in combination with other modes of decision-making. Conscious appeal to, and reliance on, chance are practices not uncommon to certain cultures and historical periods. This book also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of randomized social decision-making, as well as the arguments in favour of randomization. In addition, it advances a distinctly tentative argument for what is termed adjudication in the shadow of a lottery.

There is accumulating evidence suggesting that emotions can have a strong impact on social decision-making. However, the neural mechanisms of emotional influences on choice are less well understood to date. This chapter integrates recent results from two independent but related research streams in social neuroeconomics and social neuroscience, which together identify the neural mechanisms involved in the influences of emotions on social choice. Specifically, research in social neuroeconomics has shown that social decisions, such as trust-taking, involve commonly ignored emotional considerations in addition to economic considerations related to payouts. These results are paralleled by recent findings in social neuroscience that underline the role of emotions in social interactions. Because anticipatory emotions associated with social approval and rejection can have important, but often ignored, influences on social choices the integration of emotions into theories of social decision-making is necessary.

This chapter describes a multi-component treatment program for antisocial behavior that incorporates a wide variety of social perspective-taking opportunities: EQUIP. More specifically, it examines the two basic approaches integrated in EQUIP to treat antisocial behavior: the mutual help approach and the cognitive behavioral approach. The chapter first considers the challenge presented by aggressive and other antisocial youths to the mutual help approach, along with the value and limitations of mutual help programs. It then explains how the mutual help and cognitive behavioral approaches induce social perspective-taking, with particular emphasis on cognitive restructuring and cultivation of a mature morality through perspective-taking in social decision-making. It also looks at issues affecting the implementation of the EQUIP and concludes with illustrations of more intensive perspective-taking treatments available for severe offenders.