Dans le cadre des conférences du CIRST, Paul Erickson (Wesleyan University) présentera une communication, dont voici le résumé. In the 1950s and 1960s, long before it gained its current disciplinary association with economics, game theory was perhaps most visible within social psychology – especially in the context of investigations of teamwork and group task performance. The association of game theory with this area of the behavioral sciences may seem odd, given that then (as now) there was little consensus among game theorists as to how to solve the kind of the games that were of greatest interest to social psychologists: multi-player and non-zero-sum games. Yet if anything, the failures of game theory per se were precisely what made games attractive to social psychologists. By examining two research programs from this period, one associated with the group dynamics of Morton Deutsch and the other with the systems theory of Anatol Rapoport, this paper clarifies the role of game theory (and theory more generally) in the postwar behavioral sciences.
