Hobbes believed that the natural state of man was not a noble savage that only became violent an“”, which was fully explained in his 1651 book titled with that name. Hobbes also wrote that there were three main reasons for war: competition, glory, and distrust. We want other’s resources, we want power, and we know others do too, so we attack them with preemptive strikes. We do the damage before they can. That’s what we’ll talk about today, in this episode of the infographics show, The terrible history of ‘Hobbesian traps’. Before we give you some examples of Hobbesian Traps let’s first explain what we are talking about. As we said, Hobbes believed that a big reason for conflict was fear of others. That fear might be overstated, understated, or it might not even have much of a foundation at all. You might see it in school even, when one person attacks another for no other reason that he thought that person would attack him first. That might have happened, but it might not have happened as well. The violence could have occurred simply because one faction was paranoid. But when you are competing for resources, and a strike against you when you’re not ready could ruin you, the drive to hit first might be very strong. This is talked about in game theory. You might think about cooperating with the other side, be it a country or a person, but then you believe the other might think you show weakness and attack you. So, you don’t try and cooperate and both of you harbor this mutual distrust. We would think the best thing to do would be to talk about it, but according to Hobbes part of human nature is not trusting each other. It’s kind of animalistic. As you can guess, these traps of distrust we fall into have caused untold misery and bloodshed throughout history. Game theory goes a step further and talks about “loss aversion”, which basically means both sides suffer out of fear of losing. We might end up in a state of conflict because of distrust, but then carry o