u/Ayla_Leren

*Copied from a post made by Greg Elliot, a substack companion piece to his book, **"The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis"***

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## Table of Contents

**What Is Symbolic Selection?** — Introduces the foundation of PSH: how human created symbolic systems such as markets, money, institutions, debt, law and technology increasingly function as adaptive environments that mediate access to real resources and create selection pressures of their own.
**Same Species, Different Gameboard** — Explains how the boundary conditions of scaled symbolic systems differ from smaller reciprocal environments, and why weak feedback, social distance, information asymmetry, reduced attribution, externalization and rule writing can change the relative fitness of cooperative and instrumental strategies.
**Reciprocal and Instrumental Behavioural Architectures** — Distinguishes reciprocal from instrumental actors and uses findings from the neuroscience of psychopathy to show how differences in empathy, reward processing, inhibition, attachment and punishment sensitivity can change the effective costs of strategies available to different actors.
**Problems, Solutions, and the Games Instrumental or Psychopathic Strategies Generate** — Explains how instrumental and psychopathic architectures can generate distinctive solutions to recurring problems involving target autonomy, resource control, consequence avoidance, competitive position and rule control, and how those solutions can generate entrapment, gatekeeping, externalization, tournament, dominance, capture and lock in games.
**From Generated Games to Symbolic Selection** — Shows how strategies and the games they generate can be differentially retained when particular solutions produce greater symbolic fitness through money, resources, status, organizational survival, market share, influence or power under prevailing boundary conditions.
**From Games to Institutions** — Explains how successful game dynamics can move beyond the individuals who generated them and become encoded in contracts, technologies, algorithms, ownership structures, metrics, accounting systems, regulation and governance.
**When Psychopathic Traits Become Institutional Properties** — Explores institutional mirroring by showing how functional analogues of reduced empathy, grandiosity and dominance, reward appetite, speed and reduced inhibition, parasitism, and strategic or pathological lying can become embedded in institutional decision processes without claiming that institutions literally possess psychopathic minds.
**Why Institutions Become Evolutionary Fields** — Explains how institutions transmit entire game structures to future participants, allowing reciprocal actors to inherit instrumental games and turning the products of one round of selection into the boundary conditions governing the next.
**The Civilizational Problem** — Examines how locally rational behaviour inside inherited entrapment, tournament, externalization and lock in games can reproduce collectively destructive outcomes, allowing symbolic fitness to increase even while ecological, social or material substrate viability deteriorates.
**What Does This Mean for Artificial Intelligence?** — Uses AI as an observable case of symbolic selection, showing how objective functions can select instrumental strategies such as specification gaming, evaluator manipulation, strategic deceit and impression management, before extending the argument to AI systems deployed inside institutions whose own objective functions may already reward short horizon optimization, externalization and competitive escalation. It asks not only whether AI is aligned with the objective it is given, but whether **the objective itself is aligned with long term human and ecological viability**.
**What PSH Is Ultimately Asking** — Brings the framework together as a recursive evolutionary process in which behavioural architectures generate strategies, strategies solve problems, repeated solutions generate games, successful games become institutions, institutions select future behaviour, and successful actors can modify the gameboard again.

## What Is Symbolic Selection?

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis begins with a relatively simple evolutionary observation. Human beings remain biological organisms, and the fundamental problems of biological existence have not disappeared. We still require energy, shelter, security, resources, social cooperation and conditions compatible with survival and reproduction. What has changed dramatically as civilization has scaled is the **adaptive environment through which many of those problems must now be solved**.

Increasingly, access to the material and social conditions of life is mediated through **symbolic systems of our own creation**: money, employment, markets, corporations, debt, credentials, law, bureaucracy, financial systems and technological platforms. Money has no nutritional value, yet it determines access to food. A credential is not competence, yet it can determine access to employment and therefore resources. A credit score is not trust, yet it can determine access to housing or capital. The evolutionary significance of these systems therefore lies not simply in their ability to represent reality, but in their increasing **causal control over access to it**.

This is the starting point for what I call **Symbolic Selection**. Once symbolic systems become sufficiently consequential in allocating resources, security, status and opportunity, they begin functioning as **adaptive environments in their own right**. Markets, corporations, bureaucracies, financial systems and technological platforms contain actors, rules, rewards, penalties, information structures, constraints and criteria for success. In game theoretic terms, they become gameboards within which actors compete and cooperate, solve recurring adaptive problems, and receive different payoffs for executing different strategies. **Changing the gameboard can therefore change the relative fitness of the behavioural strategies competing within it.**

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, or PSH, is principally an evolutionary game theoretic and systems theoretic argument, grounded in and informed by findings from neuroscience, psychology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology and institutional research. It does not propose that biological evolution disappears when civilization emerges, nor that symbolic rewards such as money, status or power are equivalent to biological fitness. Rather, symbolic civilization inserts an increasingly consequential **selection environment between biological organisms and the material world upon which they ultimately depend**. This creates a set of evolutionary questions: **what kinds of behavioural architectures become relatively adaptive within the symbolic gameboards we have created, what strategies do they generate to solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems, and how do those strategies transform the games in which subsequent selection occurs?**

**The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH) Formally Stated:**

*The **Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH)** proposes that large scale symbolic systems can generate boundary conditions under which **instrumental strategies associated with psychopathic behavioural architecture acquire systematic relative fitness advantages over reciprocal alternatives**. As human interaction becomes mediated by abstraction, anonymity, scale, information asymmetry, delayed consequences, weak attribution and retaliation, opportunities to externalize costs, concentrated symbolic rewards, and endogenous rule modification, strategies associated with psychopathic neurobehavioral architecture, including emotional detachment, reward dominance, manipulation, deception, dominance seeking, reduced sensitivity to social punishment, grandiosity, and low remorse, can become comparatively cheaper to execute and more adaptive. The claim is conditional rather than universal. **Symbolic Selection occurs because changing the boundary conditions of the gameboard changes the relative costs and payoffs of the strategies competing within it.***

*The important claim is not only that psychopathic individuals may rise within institutions. It is that **behavioural architectures generate strategies, and strategies generate and transform games** in which other actors must participate. In scaled symbolic systems, actors repeatedly confront **recurring adaptive symbolic problems** concerning target autonomy, resource control, consequence avoidance, competitive position, and rule control. Different behavioural architectures can generate different solutions to the same adaptive symbolic problem. Reciprocal strategies may solve problems through trust, mutual value creation, cost internalization, cooperation, shared access, and collectively legitimate rules. Instrumental architectures can generate alternative solutions involving manipulation, dependency formation, resource capture, externalization, dominance, strategic information control, and rule modification. Critically, these strategies do not merely determine the outcome of an existing game. Through repeated execution, they can alter information states, relational states, resource distributions, incentives, rules, and the realizable strategy spaces confronting other actors. **The games identified by PSH therefore emerge endogenously from the strategies actors use to solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems.***

*The **Target Autonomy Problem** arises whenever an actor's symbolic fitness depends upon the behaviour of another autonomous actor whose future choices cannot be perfectly controlled. A reciprocal solution is to make continued cooperation sufficiently valuable that the other actor voluntarily remains. An instrumental solution is to reduce uncertainty by making the target's behaviour increasingly predictable or controllable. Social modelling can identify the target's preferences, attachments, vulnerabilities, incentives, and likely responses. Mimicry and impression management can facilitate trust or reduce resistance. Strategic deception and information control can alter the target's internal model of the interaction. Selective reinforcement can shape behaviour, commitment escalation can increase dependency, and alternative suppression can progressively raise the cost of withdrawal. None of these capacities is uniquely psychopathic. Social reasoning, modelling, and impression management are general human capacities. What matters in PSH is how those capacities are organized and deployed within a behavioural architecture, and whether reduced affective or reciprocal constraints make particular instrumental uses comparatively less costly. Repeated execution can transform the relational state itself. Trust can become commitment, commitment can become dependency, dependency can generate leverage, and leverage can progressively compress the target's realizable strategy space. **Instrumental solutions to the Target Autonomy Problem can therefore generate dependency, compliance, strategy space compression, and ultimately entrapment games.***

*The **Resource Control Problem** arises because symbolic fitness frequently depends upon access to scarce resources, capital, information, labour, infrastructure, technologies, distribution channels, audiences, or other valuable symbolic assets. Reciprocal solutions can involve exchange, specialization, coordination, and mutually beneficial access. Instrumental solutions can instead seek control over the conditions governing access itself. Acquisition, ownership concentration, bottleneck creation, proprietary systems, exclusion, and control of distribution can make other actors increasingly dependent upon the resource holder. Repeated execution changes the distribution of feasible opportunities within the system. Access that was previously open, competitive, or substitutable can become conditional upon the decisions of increasingly powerful actors. **Instrumental solutions to the Resource Control Problem can therefore generate capture, exclusion, resource control, and gatekeeping games.***

*The **Consequence Avoidance Problem** arises whenever behaviour generating symbolic reward also produces costs capable of reducing the actor's future fitness. A reciprocal solution incorporates those consequences into present decision making by accepting responsibility or internalizing costs. An instrumental solution can attempt instead to separate reward from consequence through externalization, opacity, attribution reduction, liability diffusion, temporal displacement, or strategic information control. If an actor retains profit, status, resources, or power while another actor, institution, future population, or ecological substrate absorbs part of the associated cost, the effective payoff structure has been altered. Repeated execution can normalize this separation between reward capture and cost absorption. **Instrumental solutions to the Consequence Avoidance Problem can therefore generate externalization and opacity games**, in which symbolic rewards remain concentrated while the consequences required to produce them become distributed, delayed, obscured, or difficult to attribute.*

*The **Competitive Position Problem** arises whenever symbolic fitness depends not merely upon absolute performance but upon an actor's position relative to competitors. Reciprocal solutions can involve specialization, cooperation, mutually beneficial exchange, and forms of competition constrained by shared rules. Instrumental solutions can improve relative position through dominance, accelerated capture, rival displacement, exclusion, or control over strategically important assets. Once one actor obtains an advantage through these strategies, competitors confront a changed payoff structure. Failure to respond can mean declining market share, status, resources, influence, or organizational survival. Strategies that were initially optional can therefore become competitively necessary. **Instrumental solutions to the Competitive Position Problem can generate dominance and tournament games**, in which actors are increasingly selected according to their capacity to acquire and defend relative position and restraint becomes costly when competitors do not reciprocate it.*

*The **Rule Control Problem** arises because actors in symbolic systems do not compete only within fixed games. Sufficiently successful actors can sometimes influence the rules, standards, metrics, contracts, enforcement mechanisms, technologies, or infrastructure through which future competition occurs. A reciprocal solution can support rules designed to preserve collective cooperation, procedural legitimacy, and relatively symmetrical participation. An instrumental solution can use accumulated resources, information, leverage, or authority to modify the gameboard in ways that preserve acquired advantage, increase competitors' costs, protect externalization opportunities, restrict entry, or make existing dependencies more difficult to escape. **Instrumental solutions to the Rule Control Problem can therefore generate capture and lock in games**, because successful modification of the gameboard can convert temporary advantages into persistent structural ones.*

*These game classes are therefore not arbitrary categories imposed upon the theory. **Each is an endogenous game theoretic product of repeated instrumental solutions to a recurring adaptive symbolic problem.** Target autonomy generates strategies of behavioural prediction and control that can produce dependency and entrapment games. Resource control generates strategies governing access that can produce capture and gatekeeping games. Consequence avoidance generates strategies of cost displacement and attribution reduction that can produce externalization and opacity games. Competitive positioning generates strategies of relative control and rival displacement that can produce dominance and tournament games. Rule control generates strategies of endogenous gameboard modification that can produce capture and lock in games. The causal structure is therefore one in which **recurring adaptive symbolic problems encounter heterogeneous behavioural architectures, which generate competing strategic and protocol solutions, which transform relevant state variables and thereby generate new games.***

*Importantly, these games do not exist independently of one another, nor are they imposed fully formed from above. They are **generated through repeated strategic interaction and can become recursively coupled**. The output of one generated game can become a boundary condition for another recurring adaptive symbolic problem. A resource control strategy, for example, can generate a gatekeeping game in which access to something valuable becomes conditional. That altered distribution of resources can intensify the Target Autonomy Problem because dependent actors now possess fewer viable alternatives. Dependency gives the resource holder greater leverage, enabling further commitment escalation, alternative suppression, or behavioural control and potentially generating an entrapment game. Greater leverage can then be deployed against the Rule Control Problem, allowing the successful actor to influence contracts, standards, metrics, regulation, or infrastructure and generate lock in. Those altered rules can preserve resource concentration and increase switching costs, feeding back into both the Resource Control and Target Autonomy Problems. **The solution to one recurring adaptive symbolic problem therefore changes the boundary conditions under which subsequent adaptive symbolic problems must be solved.***

*The same recursive coupling can occur between consequence avoidance and competitive position. An actor solving the Consequence Avoidance Problem through cost externalization may obtain higher measured returns than an actor following a reciprocal strategy of cost internalization. Under **Symbolic Selection**, that difference matters because the externalizing actor can acquire greater symbolic fitness through higher profit, greater market share, additional resources, organizational survival, or increased power. Competitors now confront a transformed Competitive Position Problem. Continuing to internalize costs may cause them to lose market share, investment, resources, or viability relative to actors that externalize. What began as an optional instrumental solution to the Consequence Avoidance Problem can therefore contribute to a tournament game in which reciprocal cost internalization becomes competitively expensive. If successful externalizers subsequently accumulate sufficient resources to influence standards or regulation, the tournament game can feed into the Rule Control Problem and generate further capture and lock in. **What began as one actor's instrumental solution can therefore become part of the gameboard inherited by every subsequent actor.***

*This is where **Symbolic Selection** becomes essential. Instrumental solutions are not assumed to outperform reciprocal solutions automatically. They acquire relative fitness advantages only where the boundary conditions of the symbolic system make them comparatively effective. Information asymmetry can make deception difficult to detect. Social distance can weaken reputational punishment. Delayed consequences can reduce attribution. Externalization can transfer costs beyond the actor's effective objective function. Scale can magnify the rewards associated with controlling resources or information. Accumulated symbolic fitness can provide opportunities to modify future rules. Where an instrumental solution consequently produces more profit, resources, market share, organizational survival, status, influence, or power than a reciprocal alternative, the actor or organization executing it acquires greater symbolic fitness. The strategy can spread through imitation, expansion, competitive elimination, or institutional retention. **Symbolic Selection therefore differentially retains strategic solutions and generated games according to their fitness within the prevailing symbolic environment.***

*When these strategies repeatedly outperform reciprocal alternatives under the prevailing symbolic boundary conditions, **the successful behavioural logic can become institutionally mirrored**. This is not a claim that institutions become psychopathic in a psychological sense. Rather, behaviours that successfully solved recurring adaptive symbolic problems can be copied, rewarded, formalized, automated, and eventually encoded into organizational structures. Low affective empathy can solve the problem of pursuing reward when another person's suffering would otherwise impose an inhibitory cost. Where that suffering is weakly represented in the symbolic objective, its functional analogue can become the exclusion or underweighting of displaced harm in institutional decision functions. Dominance seeking can solve uncertainty created by autonomous actors through control. Where control increases predictability, resource access, or market power, it can become ownership concentration, gatekeeping, proprietary infrastructure, or structural control over other actors' strategy spaces. Parasitic strategies can solve resource problems by separating reward capture from cost absorption. Where externalization generates greater measured returns than reciprocal cost internalization, the functional logic can become institutional architectures in which rewards remain concentrated while costs are shifted onto workers, communities, governments, or ecological systems.*

*The same process can retain other functional characteristics. Reward dominance can solve intertemporal competition by privileging immediate gains and, where short term performance governs survival and advancement, become short horizon optimization embedded in metrics, compensation systems, and organizational objectives. Grandiosity can solve threats to status, authority, or legitimacy by resisting destabilizing feedback and, where projected certainty preserves resources more effectively than acknowledging error, become feedback suppression, escalating commitment, and institutional resistance to corrective updating. Strategic deceit can solve autonomy or resource acquisition problems by altering another actor's internal model and, where information asymmetry makes this advantageous, become professionalized information management, selective disclosure, or strategic control over representations. Impression management can solve legitimacy problems by reproducing signals associated with trustworthiness, responsibility, or alignment and, where symbolic representation is cheaper than substantive behavioural change, become institutional production of legitimacy partially decoupled from underlying behaviour. Manipulation can solve the Target Autonomy Problem by altering another actor's decision environment and, where dependency, defaults, incentives, or switching costs increase behavioural predictability more cheaply than reciprocal value creation, become choice architecture, behavioural engineering, dependency formation, and strategy space compression.*

*In each case, the mapping is not merely metaphorical. **A behavioural architecture makes particular strategic solutions comparatively available or inexpensive, those solutions address recurring adaptive symbolic problems, repeated execution can generate characteristic games, Symbolic Selection rewards those games where they produce greater symbolic fitness than competing alternatives, and the functional logic producing the advantage becomes increasingly likely to be retained institutionally.** The originating actor can eventually disappear while the institution continues reproducing the selected behavioural logic.*

*This recursive process can ultimately generate a game theoretic object I call a **loss dominant equilibrium**. Loss dominance does not arise independently of the games described above. It can emerge downstream from their recursive coupling as previous rounds of Symbolic Selection progressively alter payoffs, dependencies, resource distributions, rules, and realizable strategy spaces. Dependency and entrapment games generated through instrumental solutions to the Target Autonomy Problem can raise the cost of withdrawal. Gatekeeping games generated through Resource Control can restrict access to substitutes required for viable exit. Externalization games generated through Consequence Avoidance can place actors who voluntarily internalize costs at a competitive disadvantage. Tournament games generated through Competitive Position can punish restraint when competitors continue pursuing symbolic fitness. Capture and lock in games generated through Rule Control can encode these advantages into contracts, standards, technologies, ownership structures, infrastructure, metrics, and regulation.*

*These processes can reinforce one another. Resource capture can generate dependency, dependency can create leverage, leverage can facilitate further resource or rule capture, and rule capture can preserve the conditions producing dependency. Externalization can generate a competitive advantage, that advantage can intensify tournament pressure, tournament pressure can compel competitors to externalize, and accumulated resources can eventually increase the capacity of successful actors to modify rules. Information control can simultaneously reduce the visibility or attribution of the costs generated throughout the process. **The output state of one generated game becomes an input condition for another recurring adaptive symbolic problem**, allowing the gameboard to evolve recursively rather than returning to its original state after each interaction.*

*A **loss dominant equilibrium** emerges when this accumulated game evolution changes the payoff structure sufficiently that unilateral deviation from the incumbent strategy produces a greater immediate loss than continued participation, even when continued participation contributes to an aggregate outcome the actor considers undesirable. A company may understand that environmental externalization is destructive while being unable to internalize those costs without raising prices, reducing returns, and losing market share within an inherited tournament game. A government may recognize ecological limits while remaining locked into economic growth because employment, taxation, debt stability, infrastructure, and political legitimacy have become dependent upon continued expansion. A worker may understand the broader trajectory while remaining dependent upon wages to service debt and obtain housing and essential goods. In each case, the actor need not possess an instrumental behavioural architecture and need not endorse the aggregate outcome. **The actor has inherited a game produced through previous rounds of Symbolic Selection in which the loss associated with unilateral deviation exceeds the immediate loss associated with continued participation.***

*Loss dominance therefore provides the mechanism connecting **recurring adaptive symbolic problems, endogenous game generation, Symbolic Selection, and systemic persistence**. Instrumental strategies solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems. Repeated execution transforms relational, informational, resource, and institutional states and thereby generates games. Under particular boundary conditions, some of those games produce greater symbolic fitness than reciprocal alternatives and are differentially retained through Symbolic Selection. Their outputs then modify the boundary conditions confronting subsequent actors and subsequent adaptive symbolic problems. As dependency rises, alternatives can disappear. As resources concentrate, access can become conditional. As costs are externalized, reciprocal behaviour can become competitively expensive. As tournament pressures intensify, restraint can become locally disadvantageous. As successful actors acquire rule control, these advantages can become structurally encoded. **Loss dominance emerges when this recursive evolution of the symbolic gameboard makes collectively preferable alternatives individually more costly to pursue than continued participation in the system producing the collective loss.***

*PSH therefore makes a larger civilizational claim: **selection does not merely determine who succeeds within symbolic systems; through endogenous game generation, institutional mirroring, and adaptive inheritance, it can influence what kinds of games those systems evolve into.** Behavioural architectures generate strategies and protocols. Those strategies solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems and transform relationships. Repeated strategies generate games. Symbolic Selection differentially retains the strategies and game structures producing greater symbolic fitness. Institutions encode those successful solutions into objective functions, metrics, contracts, technologies, ownership structures, standards, and rules. Those structures subsequently become boundary conditions confronting the next population of actors, creating **recursive selection regimes in which the products of one round of Symbolic Selection become part of the selection environment of the next**.*

*Under sufficiently strong recursive lock in, institutions, markets, technologies, states, and eventually civilizations can continue optimizing symbolic objective functions even as those objectives become increasingly detached from the biological, ecological, and social substrates upon which the symbolic system ultimately depends. Actors may understand that divergence while remaining embedded within games that punish unilateral deviation. The resulting trajectory therefore does not require universal psychopathy, centralized conspiracy, or collective ignorance. It can emerge through **recursive Symbolic Selection operating on heterogeneous behavioural architectures, the strategies they generate, the adaptive symbolic problems those strategies solve, and the games those solutions progressively create and preserve.***

## Same Species, Different Gameboard

There are powerful evolutionary reasons for human cooperation. Work associated with reciprocal altruism, repeated games, reciprocity, punishment and human egalitarianism, including the work of Robert Trivers, Robert Axelrod, Martin Nowak, Christopher Boehm and many others, helps explain why cooperative strategies can become remarkably stable under the right conditions. When people interact repeatedly, reputation matters, behaviour is visible, consequences return relatively quickly, exploitation can be detected and the people harmed today may be people whose cooperation is required tomorrow. Under these conditions, persistent exploitation can become expensive.

This should not be romanticized. Small human communities were never universally peaceful or egalitarian, and exploitation, violence and dominance obviously existed throughout human history. The narrower point is game theoretic. Repeated interaction, visibility, reputation, rapid feedback, attribution of consequences and credible retaliation create boundary conditions that can stabilize cooperation and constrain certain forms of exploitation.

PSH asks what happens when those boundary conditions change.

Consider many modern symbolic systems. Economic transactions can occur between people who never meet. Organizational decisions can affect thousands or millions of people separated from the decision maker by layers of bureaucracy. Environmental consequences can appear decades after the activities that produced them. Responsibility can be divided across departments, firms, contractors and jurisdictions. Information can be highly asymmetric. Costs can be shifted to populations that never participated in the original decision, while symbolic rewards such as profit, status, market share or political influence remain concentrated among the actors responsible for generating them.

Successful actors can sometimes do something even more unusual. They can influence the rules governing future competition. They can shape contracts, compensation systems, ownership structures, algorithms, metrics, regulations, standards, information flows and governance. Success therefore becomes more than adaptation to a game. Under some conditions it creates the ability to modify the game itself.

PSH does **not** claim that instrumental or psychopathic strategies universally outperform cooperation. The theory is conditional. Under repeated interaction, strong reputation, visible consequences, rapid feedback and credible retaliation, instrumental behaviour may be expensive and cooperation highly adaptive. Under conditions such as weak or delayed feedback, anonymity or social distance, information asymmetry, reduced attribution of consequences, low probability of retaliation, opportunities to externalize costs, concentrated symbolic rewards and the capacity to influence future rules, the relative payoff structure can change. The formal model explicitly treats this as a conditional region of the symbolic gameboard rather than a universal psychopathic advantage.

Put simply, **change the gameboard and we may change the relative fitness of the strategies competing within it.**

## Reciprocal and Instrumental Behavioural Architectures

This leads to a question that sits upstream of conventional strategy choice. If two people encounter exactly the same external game, do they necessarily experience that game in the same way, or generate the same set of strategies for solving it?

PSH uses the term **behavioural architecture** to describe the underlying organization of perception, prediction, affective constraint, social modelling, learning, planning, strategy generation and action selection. It is not synonymous with personality, morality or psychiatric diagnosis. It is a way of representing the machinery through which an actor interprets a situation, evaluates possible outcomes, experiences internal costs and rewards, generates strategies and ultimately acts.

For explanatory purposes, PSH contrasts two broad architectures: a **reciprocal actor** and an **instrumental actor**. These are theoretical ideal types rather than claims that human beings fall neatly into two categories.

A reciprocal actor incorporates the state of other people and the relationship itself into the effective payoff structure. Mutual benefit, trust, attachment, fairness, reputation, guilt, empathic concern and the expected value of continued cooperation can all matter. If this actor depends upon another person for future reward, an attractive solution is therefore to make continued cooperation mutually valuable. Trust is built because trust itself has value. Reciprocity stabilizes the relationship because both actors benefit from its continuation.

An instrumental actor treats the other actor more strongly as a means through which an objective can be achieved. Reward acquisition, control, dominance, resource access or future payoff stabilization may receive greater weight, while some of the internal affective costs associated with harming or exploiting another actor may be reduced. This does not imply an absence of social intelligence. On the contrary, understanding another person's emotions, beliefs, vulnerabilities and likely behaviour can be extremely useful when the purpose of social cognition is prediction rather than reciprocity.

The distinction becomes clearer with a simple example. Suppose obtaining a valuable reward requires deceiving another person. A reciprocal actor may experience guilt, empathic distress, concern about harming the relationship, reputational anxiety or fear of punishment as genuine costs. An instrumental actor may understand exactly what the other person is feeling while experiencing substantially less affective inhibition around exploiting that knowledge. The external reward is identical, but the strategy is not equally costly to both actors.

This is where the neuroscience and psychology of psychopathy become relevant to PSH. I am not proposing a new clinical or developmental theory of psychopathy. Rather, I use the existing empirical literature for a specific theoretical purpose. Research concerning affective empathy, reward processing, fear and punishment learning, inhibition, social cognition and related processes gives us an empirical basis for thinking about psychopathy as one behavioural architecture capable of generating a distinctive repertoire of strategies. In the mathematical formulation, these findings become differences in such things as internal costs, punishment sensitivity, reward weighting, strategy generation and willingness to execute particular strategies.

Psychopathy is therefore both literal and somewhat abstract within PSH. Literal psychopathy is scientifically interesting because we possess an empirical literature describing aspects of its neurocognitive architecture. But the broader theoretical object is the **instrumental behavioural architecture** and the computational problems it can solve. The theory does not require every person behaving instrumentally to be clinically psychopathic, nor does it claim that every person high in psychopathic traits will be successful. Computational ability, opportunity, social position and the surrounding gameboard all matter.

The more interesting question is: **what kinds of recurring problems might an instrumental architecture solve particularly effectively inside scaled symbolic systems?**

## Problems, Solutions, and the Games Psychopathic or Instrumental Strategies Generate

This problem and solution distinction is important because psychopathic traits are often presented as a list: reduced affective empathy, manipulativeness, dominance orientation, reward seeking, strategic deception, reduced guilt or remorse and so on. PSH asks a somewhat different question. Instead of asking only what traits are present, it asks **what recurring strategic problems can the strategies generated by this architecture solve?**

Consider the problem created whenever future reward depends upon another autonomous person. The other actor can change their mind, refuse, leave, cooperate with someone else or otherwise behave unpredictably. I call this the **Target Autonomy Problem**. If my future reward depends upon another autonomous actor, how do I make that person's future behaviour sufficiently predictable to stabilize the reward I depend upon? The formal framework treats autonomy as a source of payoff uncertainty and generalizes the problem beyond interpersonal relationships to debt, wage dependency, surveillance, platform lock in and institutional control.

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*(continued in the comments below — 8 comments follow, in order)*

You are circumstantially and unexpectedly forced to have one of two strangers watch over your child for two hours. You know nothing about them other than their spiritual beliefs, which do you choose?

A provocative cross-discipline literary synthesis from a systems and game theoretic perspective, seeking to explain how society keeps ending up with psychopaths in positions of power

Be honest! Did you win?

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH): A Guide to Symbolic Selection, Behavioural Architecture, and the Evolution of Human Gameboards

A button appears before you that teleports the world's 30,000 wealthiest people above an active volcano. Everyone would know it was you. Do you consider pressing it?

(Poll) How much interest do you believe DSA members hold for building dual power? More specifically early on, mission driven cooperative finance.

How much interest do you believe DSA members hold for building dual power? More specifically early on, mission driven cooperative finance.

Elon, you aren't a genius. You are JP from the Grandma's Boy movie, if he apathetically killed hundreds of thousands with a paper shredder.

The department of oral function has been tickling new depths

The times call for it, Chris. It would also rocket to the top five funniest things to ever happen in Congress, immortalizing you.

Mitch McConnell still dead

He's still dead Jim

Should have paid the Photoshop guy better

Put on your tinfoil hats everybody

This one is just for you Peter Thiel🖤 I know how much you love democracy.

Remind you of anyone?

Ravens win NFL Imperialism!! 🐦‍⬛

Something ominous this way comes

As prophesized

I see a couple paths to explore, though how do you believe I might best strengthen and extend this critique of capitalism and capital interests? I also hoped to passively emphasize democratic and socialized decision making as countering forces where possible.