One may fear that the other player sees the violence game in the PD terms Pinker postulates. If one is facing a player who sees violence in PD terms and for whom aggression is a dominant strategy, aggression is the optimal strategy for oneself.
The higher the payoffs for ongoing mutual cooperation, the less likely it is that victory through smash and grab aggression will yield a higher return than mutual cooperation. That should increase both players' confidence that they are playing a Trust game rather than a PD game.
Pinker represents the effects of commerce as a lifting of the upper left payoffs for both players so that they exceed the payoffs for victorious aggression. In other words, the game is now a Trust game, not a PD.
The same conversion of a PD to Trust can take place when the underlying game is a positive-sum cheating game as opposed to a negative sum violence game. To be continued...
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