Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

David Chavalarias

Imitation, Institutions and Sustainability of Social Dynamics

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ABSTRACT

What drives social dynamics and how social structures are maintained? 

In the girardian interpretation of cultural evolution man desires because he is mimetic. The entanglement of mimetic interactions leads to an emergent social order from undifferentiated population and an a posteriori distribution of desires in the population. 

On the contrary, for mainstream utilitarist interpretation inspired by economics, man is mimetic because he has some desires. In this interpretation, social dynamics are driven by these desires that are given a priori.

It is possible to reconcile these two views in the framework of metamimetic games. If we take into account both the fact that imitation shapes desires and that desires shape the forms of imitation, we can propose an interpretation of cultural evolution that avoids both the notion of a priori form of imitation or a priori forms of desires. In this view, social dynamics are driven by the different levels of uncertainty along the different dimensions that agents use to take their decisions. 

This representation of social dynamics opens the way toward a better understanding of brutal shifts in mentalities and identities within a population (think for example to human disasters like the Rwanda genocide) and how institutions could help to monitor them.

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Center For Research in Applied Epistemology (CREA), Team Complex Systems,
Adaptive Rationality and Social Cognition, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris