Coordination Causes Coarse Concepts

• In Event: Enhancing Pluralism by Understanding Systemic Biases

Abstract

This paper uses a game-theoretic model to show that when a group of people has a greater need to coordinate their actions, the group uses coarser concepts, concepts that are more blunt and less nuanced. In other words, this paper understands concepts as resulting from the need for social coordination, not just from individual cognitive processes. In this paper, a concept is a set of attributes which are all highly correlated. For example, when we think of "male," we think of a person with many typical attributes that are highly correlated in the population, including clothing, hair, name, tone of voice, and so forth. There is no obvious reason why people should use things like eyeglasses and socks to communicate gender, but they do. Communicating using multiple correlated attributes instead of multiple independent attributes makes communication less specific, and makes concepts coarser, but better generates the common knowledge necessary for coordinating actions. When there is less need for coordination, the greater specificity of multiple independent attributes maximizes social welfare. This paper also shows that certain concepts can maximize social welfare but be particularly bad for some people, who would greatly benefit if society adopted different or more varied concepts. Similarly, people well-served by existing concepts might actively resist new concepts.

Author

• Michael Chwe, UCLA