Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The division of labor phenomenon has been observed with re-spect to both manual and cognitive labor, but there is no clearunderstanding of the intra- and inter-individual mechanismsthat allow for its emergence, especially when there are multipledivisions possible and communication is limited. Situationsfitting this description include individuals in a group splittinga geographical region for resource harvesting without explicitnegotiation, or a couple tacitly negotiating the hour of the dayfor each to shower so that there is sufficient hot water. We stud-ied this phenomenon by means of an iterative two-person gamewhere multiple divisions are possible, but no explicit commu-nication is allowed. Our results suggest that there are a lim-ited number of biases toward divisions of labor, which serveas attractors in the dynamics of dyadic coordination. How-ever, unlike Schelling’s focal points, these biases do not attractplayers’ attention at the onset of the interaction, but are onlyrevealed and consolidated by the in-game dynamics of dyadicinteraction.