Institutional mirroring is one of the more easily misunderstood claims in the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis. The argument is not that corporations, governments, markets or bureaucracies literally become psychopaths, nor that the people leading them must be clinically psychopathic. Institutions do not possess nervous systems, emotions or personalities. The claim is functional and evolutionary. Under particular boundary conditions of scaled symbolic systems, behaviours generated more readily by an instrumental or psychopathic behavioural architecture may solve recurring strategic problems in ways that produce greater symbolic fitness than competing reciprocal solutions. When this occurs repeatedly, Symbolic Selection can retain the successful behaviour through imitation, organizational growth, promotion, routine formation, technology, contracts, metrics, ownership structures, governance and rules.
The proposed mechanism is therefore more specific than resemblance. Behavioural architecture sits upstream of strategy generation. It influences which strategies are psychologically available, how costly they are to execute, how strongly particular consequences are represented, and what kinds of solutions an actor can generate when confronted with a recurring problem. Those strategies then operate inside a symbolic gameboard whose boundary conditions determine their relative costs and rewards. If a particular solution repeatedly produces greater profit, status, organizational survival, resource access, market share, political influence or power, it acquires greater symbolic fitness. Symbolic Selection then acts through differential retention: successful behaviours are copied, rewarded, normalized, formalized, automated or embedded. Over time, the function originally produced by an individual behavioural architecture can become reproduced by the architecture of the institution itself.
This distinction matters because PSH does not claim that instrumental strategies are intrinsically superior. In tightly coupled environments characterized by repeated interaction, visible consequences, strong attribution, reputation, rapid feedback and credible retaliation, reciprocal strategies can be highly adaptive. The mathematical framework explicitly treats the theory as conditional. Environments with high detection, rapid feedback, high retaliation probability and limited opportunities for externalization can stabilize reciprocal strategies, while weak feedback, low attribution, low retaliation, high abstraction, high externalization, concentrated symbolic reward and rule-modification capacity can shift the relative fitness landscape toward instrumental alternatives. The question posed by Symbolic Selection is therefore not whether psychopathic traits are universally advantageous. It is what happens when heterogeneous behavioural architectures compete inside scaled symbolic systems in which the costs and benefits of particular strategies are distributed unevenly across time, space, population and institutional layers.
Low Affective Empathy and the Exclusion of Suffering from Objective Functions
Low affective empathy illustrates the mechanism particularly clearly because the relevant selection advantage may arise from the reduced internal cost of executing a strategy. At the individual level, a person may fully understand that another person is suffering while experiencing less emotional resonance with that suffering and therefore less affective inhibition around exploiting or harming them. The recurring strategic problem is straightforward: how does an actor maximize a valued outcome when achieving that outcome imposes substantial costs on other people? A reciprocal architecture may solve the problem by integrating the welfare of affected actors into the decision itself, accepting a smaller immediate reward in exchange for preserving human welfare, trust, reciprocity or longer-term relational stability. An instrumental architecture can solve the same problem differently if the suffering of others imposes a weaker internal inhibitory cost.
Now place both actors inside a scaled symbolic system in which organizational success is evaluated through profit, productivity, return on investment or another quantifiable performance measure, while displaced human suffering is weakly represented or not represented at all. Imagine an organization considering the closure of a manufacturing facility. Closing the plant produces a substantial financial saving, but also imposes major psychological, social and economic costs on workers and the surrounding community. A reciprocal decision-maker may try to reduce those harms through transition support, extended notice, alternative employment programs or a more gradual restructuring, thereby reducing the immediate financial gain. Another actor may execute the closure rapidly and capture the entire saving. If promotion, valuation and capital allocation respond primarily to the financial result, while the communal harm remains external to the formal decision function, the second strategy can produce greater symbolic fitness even if it produces lower total welfare.
Symbolic Selection does not need to select cruelty as a conscious motive. It can select a decision procedure in which displaced suffering carries insufficient weight relative to the symbolic objective being optimized. If that procedure repeatedly produces higher measured performance, it can become organizationally retained. Financial models omit variables that are difficult to monetize, decision templates privilege quantifiable costs, responsibility becomes distributed across departments and qualitative human consequences become secondary to binding numerical targets. Eventually the organization no longer requires emotionally detached decision-makers. The institutional objective function itself performs something functionally similar to low affective empathy because the suffering of affected actors is systematically underweighted or absent from the variables governing choice. This is the mechanism already implicit in the existing PSH formulation: harm does not have to be consciously enjoyed or deliberately ignored; it can simply be absent from the objective function.
Dominance, Power Seeking and Structural Control over Strategy Space
Dominance and power seeking solve a different recurring problem. Any actor whose future reward depends upon the choices of another autonomous actor faces uncertainty. A supplier can leave, an employee can resign, a customer can switch providers, a competitor can enter the market and a coalition partner can defect. A reciprocal solution to this problem is to make continued participation sufficiently valuable that the other actor voluntarily remains. Trust, reciprocity, mutual dependence, reputation and negotiated benefit stabilize behaviour without eliminating meaningful alternatives. An instrumental solution is to reduce the other actor’s capacity to determine outcomes independently.
At interpersonal scale this may involve coercion, dependency or control. At institutional scale, the same functional problem can be solved through ownership concentration, exclusive contracts, vertical integration, proprietary standards, control of distribution, switching costs or platform dependence. Consider a digital platform that depends upon users and complementary businesses. One strategy is to remain highly interoperable and retain participants by continually offering sufficient value. Another is to accumulate proprietary data, create network effects, restrict interoperability and increase switching costs until exit becomes increasingly expensive. Both strategies address the same problem of behavioural uncertainty, but they do so differently.
Under Symbolic Selection, what matters is whether one of these solutions produces greater symbolic fitness under the prevailing boundary conditions. If structural control increases recurring revenue, bargaining power, user retention, market share and predictability, the control-oriented strategy can outperform the more reciprocal alternative. The firm that allows easy exit may provide greater autonomy to participants, while the firm that successfully creates dependency may acquire more resources and become harder to challenge. The successful architecture then expands, competitors imitate it, investors reward recurring revenue and product teams increasingly optimize retention rather than voluntary mobility. What began as a behavioural solution to uncertainty becomes a resource-control or gatekeeping game.
The institutional analogue of dominance is therefore not a metaphorical desire for power. It is structural control over other actors’ realizable strategy spaces. The institution has retained the function of dominance because that function solved a recurring autonomy problem and produced greater symbolic fitness. This directly connects to the Target Autonomy Problem in the formal model: if another actor’s autonomy creates uncertainty, one solution is cooperation, while another is control.
Parasitism and the Selection of Externalization
Parasitism provides one of the clearest examples of how Symbolic Selection can preserve a behavioural logic through differential payoff. The recurring problem is how to acquire and retain resources while minimizing the costs required to obtain and sustain them. A reciprocal solution attempts to preserve a sufficiently balanced exchange that the relationship or surrounding system remains viable. An instrumental solution separates reward capture from cost absorption by transferring part of the burden onto another actor, institution, community or ecological substrate.
At institutional scale, repeated execution of this solution generates an externalization game. Imagine two otherwise similar firms producing the same revenue. The first spends significant resources controlling pollution, maintaining infrastructure and absorbing the downstream costs generated by its activities. The second succeeds in shifting a substantial portion of those costs onto workers, communities, governments or ecological systems. If the symbolic objective governing competition is profit, and the displaced costs remain outside the firm’s accounting boundary, the second firm can exhibit greater symbolic fitness. Its higher measured returns provide additional capital for expansion, acquisitions, marketing, executive compensation and political influence.
The selection mechanism then becomes self-reinforcing. The firm internalizing more of its costs faces pressure either to accept a competitive disadvantage, imitate the externalizing strategy or leave the game. Managers associated with cost reduction are rewarded. Supply contracts push risks downward. Legal structures diffuse liability. Accounting distinguishes private costs from public costs. Lobbying can preserve regulatory conditions favourable to cost displacement. In time, nobody needs to consciously formulate a parasitic objective. The institutional architecture reproduces the same functional pattern because reward remains concentrated while cost is externalized. That is already the essential formulation in the existing section.
Symbolic Selection is therefore doing more than rewarding a single opportunistic act. It is differentially retaining an externalization strategy because the symbolic gameboard measures the captured reward more strongly than the displaced consequence. Over time, the originating actor can disappear while the externalization game remains.
Reward Dominance, Deferred Consequence and Institutional Short-Termism
Reward dominance concerns the weighting of immediate reward relative to delayed consequence. The recurring problem is intertemporal: which opportunity should an actor pursue when immediate symbolic gains and longer-term relational, ecological or systemic consequences point in different directions? A reciprocal or consequence-integrating solution may accept a smaller immediate payoff in order to preserve future resilience, trust or viability. A reward-dominant solution places greater weight on the immediately available gain.
Scaled symbolic systems can make the second solution especially competitive because rewards and consequences often operate at different temporal and institutional scales. A manager may receive a bonus this year for reducing maintenance expenditure while equipment failures emerge many years later. A corporation may receive an immediate valuation increase from aggressive expansion while environmental liabilities accumulate slowly. A government may obtain employment, tax revenue and electoral support from growth while ecological deterioration remains delayed, distributed or politically invisible.
The important point is not that decision-makers fail to understand delayed consequences. They may understand them perfectly well. The problem is that immediate symbolic reward can be more consequential to organizational survival and personal advancement than delayed diffuse cost. If promotion, compensation, valuation or electoral success consistently favour the actor capturing the near-term gain, Symbolic Selection can differentially retain short-horizon behaviour.
Repeated selection then moves the temporal preference into institutional architecture. Compensation systems become tied to near-term metrics, budgets privilege current-period performance, projects generating delayed resilience compete poorly against projects producing immediate measurable returns, and planning horizons contract. The institution has not acquired a biological appetite or dopamine system. It has acquired a temporal payoff structure in which immediate symbolic reward carries greater adaptive weight than delayed consequence. The behavioural function has been retained through the selection environment.
Speed, Appetite and Institutional Acceleration
The same logic applies to speed, impulsivity and weakened inhibition, but here the recurring strategic problem concerns tempo. How quickly should an actor exploit an opportunity when competitors are capable of capturing it first? A reciprocal or restraint-oriented solution may allow additional time for safety analysis, consultation, consequence evaluation and corrective learning. An instrumental solution may favour rapid capture before competitors can respond.
Imagine two firms identifying the same commercial opportunity. One conducts extended analysis and delays entry until uncertainty has been reduced. The other moves immediately, accepts more unresolved risk and enters the market first. If early entry produces market share, network effects, investment capital or data before negative consequences become visible, the faster actor may receive greater symbolic fitness. Once that advantage occurs repeatedly, competitors confront a transformed gameboard. Deliberation no longer represents only caution; it becomes a competitive cost.
Symbolic Selection can then retain tempo itself. Product cycles shorten, decision authority is redesigned to remove delay, “time to market” becomes an explicit performance metric and technological systems automate activities previously requiring deliberation. Organizations that cannot operate at the selected tempo may disappear or imitate those that can. The original behavioural difference in inhibition no longer needs to remain psychological. The symbolic environment itself begins selecting for institutional acceleration. What emerges is a tournament or positional race in which restraint can become locally maladaptive even when slower collective behaviour would produce better long-run outcomes.
Grandiosity, Feedback Suppression and Escalating Commitment
Grandiosity becomes more analytically useful when treated as a solution to a strategic problem rather than simply as an exaggerated sense of self. The recurring problem is how an actor preserves status, authority, legitimacy or access to resources when evidence threatens the position upon which those rewards depend. A reciprocal or epistemically responsive solution incorporates criticism, acknowledges uncertainty, updates beliefs and accepts the possibility of being wrong. This can improve long-run accuracy but may impose a substantial immediate symbolic cost through lost confidence, lost investment, diminished status or admission of failure.
A grandiose solution handles the same problem differently. The actor maintains certainty, discounts threatening evidence, externalizes blame and protects the narrative sustaining continued authority. Whether that behaviour survives depends upon the symbolic gameboard. Imagine two executives overseeing troubled projects. One publicly acknowledges that the assumptions underlying the project may have been wrong and recommends suspending it. The other maintains that the strategy remains fundamentally correct, attributes setbacks to temporary implementation problems and projects strong confidence in eventual success. If boards, investors or senior leaders reward certainty and penalize visible admission of failure, the second actor may preserve resources and authority longer.
When this repeatedly produces symbolic fitness, Symbolic Selection can retain the behavioural function. Organizations begin promoting confidence, negative information becomes harder to communicate upward, forecasts become increasingly optimistic and public commitments increase the reputational cost of reversal. Leadership narratives become attached to organizational identity, so admitting error threatens not merely a decision but the legitimacy of the institution itself. Eventually the originating grandiose leader is unnecessary. Feedback suppression and escalating commitment have been encoded into the organizational game.
The institutional analogue of grandiosity is therefore not simply organizational arrogance. It is a selection environment in which preserving an advantageous representation of competence produces more symbolic reward than corrective updating. The behaviour solves the problem of threatened status and legitimacy, and where that solution outcompetes humility or revision, the function can be retained institutionally.
Strategic Deceit and Institutional Information Control
Strategic deceit solves an information problem. If another autonomous actor controls a decision affecting my future reward, one way of influencing that decision is to alter the information upon which it is based. A reciprocal solution attempts to provide sufficiently accurate information that cooperation is voluntarily chosen. An instrumental solution changes the target’s internal model or information environment so that the target becomes more likely to choose the desired action.
This formulation is preferable to saying that the actor “changes material reality,” because the strategic mechanism concerns representation. The underlying situation may remain unchanged. What changes is what the target believes about it.
Consider two firms seeking investment. One communicates both upside and uncertainty accurately. The other emphasizes favourable assumptions, minimizes downside risks and structures disclosure to maximize investor confidence. If verification is costly, attribution is delayed and successful financing arrives before negative consequences become visible, the second strategy may attract more capital. It has solved the resource-acquisition problem more effectively within that symbolic environment.
If strategically organized information repeatedly produces greater investment, sales, legitimacy or political support, Symbolic Selection can retain the behaviour. Communications specialists are hired, investor-relations practices become standardized, lobbying organizations develop expertise in framing issues, reporting conventions become optimized for presentation and algorithms increasingly tailor messages to expected behavioural responses. Strategic deceit has become institutional information management.
The institution no longer requires a single liar at its centre. The information architecture itself can systematically alter what other actors perceive. This is the institutional retention of a behavioural solution because the solution repeatedly generated greater symbolic fitness than transparent communication under conditions of information asymmetry, weak attribution or delayed consequence.
Pathological Lying and Narrative-Preservation Architecture
Pathological lying represents a stronger version of the same informational problem. The relevant strategic question is what happens when institutional survival depends upon maintaining a representation that accumulating evidence increasingly threatens. A reciprocal epistemic solution updates the representation when reality contradicts it. An instrumental solution preserves the representation when preservation produces greater symbolic fitness than correction.
Imagine an organization whose budget, valuation, leadership legitimacy and continued existence depend upon demonstrating that a major program is succeeding. Early results are poor. If acknowledging failure threatens funding, careers or organizational survival, the information-selection environment can begin favouring favourable interpretations. Negative findings travel upward less readily, ambiguous measures are interpreted positively, indicators are changed, successes receive greater visibility and employees learn that pessimistic reporting carries career costs.
No central mastermind is required. Symbolic Selection can operate through differential survival of representations. Information supporting institutional continuity receives reward, while information threatening continuity becomes expensive to communicate. Over time, the institution’s information architecture begins preserving the narrative necessary for its own continuation.
The institutional analogue of pathological lying is therefore not a psychological compulsion. It is a narrative-preservation architecture in which maintaining an advantageous representation generates more symbolic fitness than correcting that representation in response to evidence. Strategic deceit may alter another actor’s internal model for a particular advantage; narrative-preservation architecture can eventually modify the institution’s own internal model as well.
Impression Management and the Decoupling of Symbolic Legitimacy from Behaviour
Impression management solves a legitimacy problem. Actors often need to obtain the benefits associated with trustworthiness, morality, competence, responsibility or alignment. A reciprocal solution earns those signals by bearing the substantive behavioural costs associated with them. If an organization wants to be regarded as environmentally responsible, for example, it can materially change its practices and incur the associated expense.
An instrumental alternative is to reproduce the signals associated with responsibility at lower cost. This creates a particularly important Symbolic Selection problem because symbolic systems necessarily operate through representations. If audiences cannot perfectly observe the underlying condition, the representation itself can become a target of optimization.
Imagine one organization spending very large sums materially changing environmentally damaging practices, while another spends far less constructing a sophisticated sustainability narrative and changes substantially less of the underlying behaviour. If investors, consumers or regulators cannot fully distinguish the two, the second organization may obtain a large portion of the same symbolic benefit at much lower cost. The appearance of alignment has partially separated from the behaviour it is supposed to represent.
Under those conditions, Symbolic Selection can favour simulation over substantive transformation. Branding systems expand, public displays of concern become professionally optimized, reputation metrics emerge and organizations learn which symbols audiences associate with responsibility. This does not imply that all sustainability programs, values statements or corporate purpose initiatives are insincere. The claim is conditional. Wherever the representation of alignment can obtain symbolic reward more cheaply than the costly behaviour it represents, there is selection pressure for the symbol itself to become an optimization target.
The institutional analogue of impression management is therefore the production of symbolic legitimacy partially decoupled from underlying reciprocity.
Manipulation, Choice Architecture and Strategy-Space Compression
Manipulation differs from strategic deceit because the actor need not produce false beliefs. The recurring problem is again one of autonomy: how can another actor’s future behaviour be made sufficiently predictable when they remain formally free to choose? A reciprocal solution stabilizes behaviour by increasing the value of the relationship. An instrumental solution changes the decision environment itself.
The actor can modify incentives, defaults, visibility, commitments, switching costs, alternatives or information flows until some behaviours become easier and others more expensive. At institutional scale this becomes choice architecture. Platforms determine what users see, employers structure deferred compensation, lenders determine repayment schedules, subscription services create cancellation friction and marketplaces determine which alternatives remain visible.
Consider two employment systems providing similar compensation. One maintains portable benefits and relatively low exit costs. The other uses deferred compensation, non-portable benefits or other arrangements that make departure progressively more costly. If the second system experiences lower turnover and therefore greater predictability, the instrumental solution may generate greater symbolic fitness even though the worker retains nominal freedom.
This is a direct example of Symbolic Selection operating on solutions to the Target Autonomy Problem. The reciprocal strategy attempts to make participation voluntarily attractive; the instrumental strategy makes departure increasingly costly. If dependency is cheaper or more reliable than continuously maintaining reciprocal value, the instrumental strategy can outcompete the reciprocal alternative under particular symbolic boundary conditions.
Repeated selection then institutionalizes the mechanism. Contracts, algorithms, interfaces, repayment structures and ownership systems become mechanisms through which behaviour is shaped. The institution need not possess manipulative intent in the psychological sense. Functionally, the environment surrounding the target has been configured so that some choices become easier, cheaper or more rewarding while others become increasingly costly. This is the mechanism already present in the PSH account of manipulation, dependency and strategy-space compression.
When dependency accumulates far enough that remaining becomes costly but leaving becomes even more costly, the generated relationship can become an entrapment game. The behaviour that originally solved uncertainty through control has now altered the target’s realistic strategy space.
Why Instrumental Solutions Can Outcompete Reciprocal Ones in Scaled Symbolic Systems
The comparison between instrumental and reciprocal solutions needs to remain explicit because Symbolic Selection is not a theory of universal instrumental superiority. Reciprocal solutions have major adaptive advantages. They generate trust, reduce monitoring costs, support information sharing, preserve reputation, stabilize long-term cooperation and often increase collective resilience. Under tightly coupled conditions, those advantages can dominate.
Scaled symbolic systems can alter the comparison by weakening some of the penalties that ordinarily constrain instrumental behaviour while preserving or amplifying the rewards. As consequences become delayed, interactions become anonymous, harm travels farther from the actor producing it, information becomes asymmetric, attribution weakens and costs become externalizable, instrumental strategies can become less expensive to execute. At the same time, symbolic rewards such as profit, market share, valuation, rank, votes, productivity or institutional survival remain immediate, measurable and highly consequential.
This creates a structural asymmetry. Symbolic benefit may be concentrated, quantifiable and attributed to the actor, while human, ecological or systemic cost is delayed, dispersed, difficult to attribute or absent from the objective function. Under those conditions, a strategy can generate high symbolic fitness even while degrading the material or social systems upon which the game ultimately depends.
The reciprocal firm that internalizes environmental cost may lose market share to the firm that externalizes it. The transparent leader may lose funding to the leader who manages perceptions more effectively. The interoperable platform may lose users to the platform that successfully creates network dependence. The cautious organization may lose an opportunity to the organization willing to move before consequences become visible. The leader acknowledging uncertainty may lose legitimacy to the leader projecting certainty. None of these outcomes proves that the instrumental strategy is socially superior. It demonstrates that a particular symbolic gameboard may reward one strategy more strongly than another.
Once those payoff differences affect survival, growth, promotion, imitation, resource accumulation or rule-writing capacity, the process becomes evolutionary. Behaviours associated with greater symbolic fitness become more prevalent, while competing behaviours decline, adapt or disappear. The significance of Symbolic Selection is that this process need not stop at actors. Successful behaviours can become routines, successful routines can become institutional practice, successful practices can become metrics and technologies, and successful institutional architectures can eventually alter the boundary conditions confronting future actors.
From Behavioural Selection to Institutional Mirroring
Institutional mirroring can therefore be understood as the downstream product of Symbolic Selection. A behavioural architecture makes a particular solution comparatively available or inexpensive to execute. That solution addresses a recurring strategic problem. Repeated execution generates a characteristic game. Under particular symbolic boundary conditions, that game produces greater symbolic fitness than competing reciprocal alternatives. The behaviour is then more likely to persist because the actor or organization executing it receives more resources, market share, authority, status, organizational survival or rule-writing capacity.
The successful solution subsequently becomes available for retention beyond the originating actor. Other actors imitate it. Organizations formalize it. Promotion systems reward people capable of reproducing it. Metrics encode its priorities. Technologies automate it. Contracts stabilize it. Accounting systems represent it. Governance structures protect it. Rules preserve it.
This is the selection mechanism connecting psychopathic behavioural traits to institutional games.
Low affective empathy can solve the problem of acting when another person’s suffering interferes with reward acquisition; where displaced suffering is weakly represented, the selected institutional analogue can become the exclusion of suffering from objective functions. Dominance can solve uncertainty created by autonomous actors through structural control; where control increases predictability and market power, it can become ownership concentration, gatekeeping and strategy-space compression. Parasitism can solve the resource problem by separating reward capture from cost absorption; where externalization produces greater measured returns, it can become institutionalized cost shifting. Reward dominance can solve intertemporal competition by privileging immediate reward; where short-term performance governs survival and advancement, it can become short-horizon institutional objective functions.
Speed and weak inhibition can solve positional competition by capturing opportunities before rivals; where delay carries a symbolic penalty, they can become institutional acceleration. Grandiosity can solve threats to authority and legitimacy by suppressing destabilizing feedback; where projected certainty retains resources more effectively than epistemic humility, it can become feedback suppression and escalating commitment. Strategic deceit can solve autonomy and resource-acquisition problems by altering another actor’s internal model; where information asymmetry makes such strategies effective, it can become institutional information control. Pathological lying can solve threats to organizational continuity by preserving advantageous representations; where acknowledging failure threatens survival, it can become narrative-preservation architecture. Impression management can solve the legitimacy problem by reproducing the signals associated with trust or responsibility; where representations are cheaper than the behaviours they signify, it can become professionalized symbolic legitimacy production. Manipulation can solve the Target Autonomy Problem by configuring another actor’s decision environment; where dependency and switching costs cheaply increase behavioural predictability, it can become choice architecture, strategy-space compression and entrapment.
The claim is therefore not that institutions inherit psychopathic minds. Institutions can inherit the functional logic of behaviours that Symbolic Selection repeatedly rewarded.
Once encoded, those functions no longer require the behavioural architecture that originally generated them. A deeply empathic manager can inherit a decision model that excludes displaced suffering. A cooperative employee can administer a contract that creates dependency. An honest communications professional can operate inside an information architecture that systematically privileges favourable representations. A leader committed to ecological sustainability can remain embedded in a market game where unilateral cost internalization threatens organizational survival.
At that point behaviour has become structure, and structure has become environment.
Institutional mirroring therefore completes the recursive loop at the centre of PSH. Symbolic boundary conditions alter the relative fitness of behavioural solutions. Successful solutions generate characteristic games. Symbolic Selection differentially retains those games. Institutions encode the selected logic through routines, technologies, metrics, contracts, objective functions and rules. Those institutional structures then become part of the symbolic boundary conditions confronting subsequent actors.
The originating actor can disappear, and the behaviour no longer needs to be consciously chosen. The game remains because the environment has begun preserving what it previously selected.
Greg Michael Elliott is a systems theorist, pure and applied mathematician, and technology strategist whose work explores the relationship between human psychology, institutions, and civilizational evolution. He is the author of The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, an interdisciplinary framework that integrates game theory, behavioural economics, psychology, neuroscience, systems theory, and evolutionary theory to examine how modern symbolic institutions can unintentionally select for psychologically exploitative behavioural strategies.
Professionally, Greg works in industrial artificial intelligence and digital twins, developing advanced modelling, optimization, and AI solutions for critical infrastructure across the energy sector. His background includes mathematical physics, financial engineering, machine learning, and complex systems (Model Based Systems Engineering in particular).
His current research focuses on understanding how dependency formation, loss-dominant equilibria, and institutional incentives interact to shape large-scale social outcomes. More recently, his work has begun exploring possible pathways for designing institutions that promote cooperation, resilience, and long-term human flourishing.
