Unravelling into war: trust and social preferences in Hobbes’s state of nature

Abstract According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences , that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.