The academic discipline of game theory has been one of the most impactful contributions to the study of social dynamics.

Using mathematical models to analyze decisions of human agents, game theory can be applied to a variety of fields, such as business decisions, conflict between states, group decision-making, to the genes acquired by organisms in evolutionary biology.

Discussions on the mathematics of games began in the 17^th century, with sketches exploring the structure of the games of chance emerging.

A prominent figure in the field during the 1940s and the main character in the movie A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is the most well-known figure associated with the discipline. He viewed social relations as being always governed by what he called “governing dynamics”.

While in class during my university days, one of the students seemed perplexed by the way game theory could realistically apply to the real world.

“People don’t take out a piece of paper and build matrices, decision trees, write down probabilities to map out their decisions. How could this apply to real-life in any shape?”, she asked.

“It doesn’t matter, their decision is still driven by an underlying mathematical calculus. This can be viewed as an after-the-fact induction from their decisions”, the professor said.

Pausing for a few seconds, I tried to absorb that message without making much sense of it at the time.

After having taken a few courses in the field, here are some of my main takeaways from the field of game theory:

• Humans are much more rational than we might be led to believe. The same way there are evolutionary forces that shape organisms to optimize their survival and reproduction, humans are wired to optimize their decisions given their values and their perception of reality.

• Every human decision is a function of how we perceive reality – in other words, what we assign value to, what we believe the other party values, our expectation of the other’s actions and the probability of different events.

• The majority of humans are rational, except for people suffering from neurological issues such as autism. In instances humans make decisions that cannot be understood by others, it often boils down to differences in values and perception. For example, drug addicts do what they do because they assign much greater value to instant gratification than to their health. Suicide bombers assign greater value to martyrdom than life on earth.

• All human agents, individuals, families, nations are driven by values, whether economic or cultural values, and their psychological perception of reality.

• Order, harmony, peace is the result of the concept of “equilibrium”. Chaos and fragmentation is the result of disequilibrium. An equilibrium is a state in which no party has an incentive to unilaterally deviate from.

• Any strategic dynamic can ultimately be modeled mathematically, by employing reductionist methods and using ordinal measurements. This implies that every human decision is driven by an underlying mathematical calculus, whether we are able to measure or capture it in the moment or not. Prior to Newton’s discovery of the law of universal gravitation, did every particle not already attract every other particle in the universe with a force proportional to the product of their masses? The point here is that a phenomenon exists independently of human ability to measure and model that phenomenon.

Game theory can be considered one of the most fundamental disciplines within the wider field of sociology.

The study of game theory provides a lens through which to view the strategic interactions that permeate various aspects of human life.

It can be applied to better understand various social scenarios, such as the decision to escalate or not, two states competing or cooperating, pricing decisions for businesses, the underlying drivers of coalition forming, deterrence in war, and why conflict or peace may emerge.

It challenges preconceptions about decision-making, revealing the underlying rationality that often governs even the most complex social scenarios.

Even amidst chaos, there is structure in the way things work.