Abstract: In this talk, I argue that a significant factor in the evolution of human cooperation is the coevolution of commitment and cooperation. I show how different methods of undertaking commitments in our evolutionary history have enabled more sophisticated forms of cooperation over time. These, in turn, create the selective environment for the evolution of increasingly effective commitments. I detail the emergence and consequences of four types of commitment: commitment in shared activity, explicit linguistic promising, implicit commitment via gossip, and institutionalized commitment.

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