An Evolutionary Game Approach to Fundamentalism and Conflict

This paper investigates the evolutionary equilibria of a clash of cultures game where conflict results from failures to share social power in individual pairings. Members of a general subpopulation are matched with those of a fundamentalist subpopulation, the latter being more cohesive and insistent that their identity traits define the norms for, and outcomes of, social, economic, and political interaction. Simulations of the evolutionary dynamics reveal a tradeoff between the intolerance of fundamentalism and the likelihood of a takeover. This tradeoff is reversed if fundamentalism is falsifiable: affording non-fundamentalists the ability to signal fundamentalist traits produces a bandwagon effect.