UC San Diego

People naturally embed themselves within communities. In doing so, people choose not only whether to cooperate with people in their social environment but how to cooperate. Here, I propose that people can produce strategic behaviors as a product of pursuing their goals while predicting how others may interact. Furthermore, individuals' socially motivated behaviors scale up to drive emergent collective behaviors. By examining these behaviors, this dissertation bridges interactions between different social hierarchies---individuals, dyads, and collectives---via recursive social cognitive mechanisms. More specifically, each chapter will address the following questions. Chapter 1 asks how parallel individuals' goals can be used to scaffold how we understand communities' behavior. Here I analyze how individual scientists' decisions, by combining network and topic space measures, coalesce to determine how integrated the cognitive science community has become in the last two decades. Chapter 2 tests how individuals deceive with lies via recursive social reasoning and strategic planning to dodge others' enforcement. Chapter 3 considers how enforcers adapt their expectations about what interpretation to take away from messages when they suspect defectors. This shift in how people interpret messages can then lead to runaway effects at the collective level, such as imprecise approximations about the truth and cooperative speakers also being induced to lie for their messages to be understood accurately. Overall, this work lays the foundation toward a unifying theory of people's and collective's behaviors arising from individualistic goals in social environments.