User:Nick Gardner /Sandbox

Social capital is believed to come into being by the process termed emergence by which a complex interactive system can transform itself from chaos to order. The initial position is taken to be similar to the "state of nature" envisaged by Thomas Hobbes in which there is a constant "war of all against all". That condition is taken to be analagous to the prisoner's dilemma parable in which both participants suffer unnecessarily because neither trusts the other. It is known, however, that if the two protagonists expect to interact repeatedly they can arrive by trial and error at a mutually beneficial evolutionary stable strategy, and that once such a strategy is established, it is likely to persist.