期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2020
卷号：117
期号：48
页码：30012-30013
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2021188117
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：In 1795, philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed rules to promote perpetual peace among nations (1). He first required that all nations be republics, because when “the consent of the subjects is required to determine whether there shall be war or not, nothing is more natural than that they should weigh the matter well, before undertaking such a bad business” ref. 1, p. 122. In contrast, a despotic ruler “does not lose a whit by the war, while he goes on enjoying the delights of his table or sport, or of his pleasure palaces and gala days. He can therefore decide on war for the most trifling reasons, as if it were a kind of pleasure party” ref. 1, p. 123. In a PNAS paper that marries evolutionary game theory with tests of data from a long-term study of banded mongooses (Fig. 1), Johnstone et al. (2) confirm Kant’s insight that destructive intergroup fighting becomes more likely when leaders have more to gain, or less to lose, from fighting than do their followers.
