Emergence of Social Punishment and Cooperation through Prior Commitments

Social punishment, whereby cooperators punish defectors, has been suggested as an important mechanism that promotes the emergence of cooperation or maintenance of social norms in the context of the one-shot (i.e. non-repeated) interaction. However, whenever antisocial punishment, whereby defectors punish cooperators, is available, this antisocial behavior outperforms social punishment, leading to the destruction of cooperation. In this paper, we use evolutionary game theory to show that this antisocial behavior can be efficiently restrained by relying on prior commitments, wherein agents can arrange, prior to an interaction, agreements regarding posterior compensation by those who dishonor the agreements. We show that, although the commitment mechanism by itself can guarantee a notable level of cooperation, a significantly higher level is achieved when both mechanisms, those of proposing prior commitments and of punishment, are available in co-presence. Interestingly, social punishment prevails and dominates in this system as it can take advantage of the commitment mechanism to cope with antisocial behaviors. That is, establishment of a commitment system helps to pave the way for the evolution of social punishment and abundant cooperation, even in the presence of antisocial punishment

Are Big Gods a big deal in the emergence of big groups?

In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research

A synergy of costly punishment and commitment in cooperation dilemmas

To ensure cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, individuals may require prior commitments from others, subject to compensations when agreements to cooperate are violated. Alternatively, individuals may prefer to behave reactively, without arranging prior commitments, by simply punishing those who misbehave. These two mechanisms have been shown to promote the emergence of cooperation, yet are complementary in the way they aim to promote cooperation. Although both mechanisms have their specific limitations, either one of them can overcome the problems of the other. On one hand, costly punishment requires an excessive effect-to-cost ratio to be successful, and this ratio can be significantly reduced by arranging a prior commitment with a more limited compensation. On the other hand, commitment-proposing strategies can be suppressed by free-riding strategies that commit only when someone else is paying the cost to arrange the deal, whom in turn can be dealt with more effectively by reactive punishers. Using methods from Evolutionary Game Theory, we present here an analytical model showing that there is a wide range of settings for which the combined strategy outperforms either strategy by itself, leading to significantly higher levels of cooperation. Interestingly, the improvement is most significant when the cost of arranging commitments is sufficiently high and the penalty reaches a certain threshold, thereby overcoming the weaknesses of both mechanisms.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Employing AI to Better Understand Our Morals

We present a summary of research that we have conducted employing AI to better understand human morality. This summary adumbrates theoretical fundamentals and considers how to regulate development of powerful new AI technologies. The latter research aim is benevolent AI, with fair distribution of benefits associated with the development of these and related technologies, avoiding disparities of power and wealth due to unregulated competition. Our approach avoids statistical models employed in other approaches to solve moral dilemmas, because these are “blind” to natural constraints on moral agents, and risk perpetuating mistakes. Instead, our approach employs, for instance, psychologically realistic counterfactual reasoning in group dynamics. The present paper reviews studies involving factors fundamental to human moral motivation, including egoism vs. altruism, commitment vs. defaulting, guilt vs. non-guilt, apology plus forgiveness, counterfactual collaboration, among other factors fundamental in the motivation of moral action. These being basic elements in most moral systems, our studies deliver generalizable conclusions that inform efforts to achieve greater sustainability and global benefit, regardless of cultural specificities in constituents

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religio

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world.by-product hypothesis, credibility enhancing displays, cultural 40 transmission, cooperation, group competition, high gods,min

Evolution of coordination in pairwise and multi-player interactions via prior commitments

Upon starting a collective endeavour, it is important to understand your partners' preferences and how strongly they commit to a common goal. Establishing a prior commitment or agreement in terms of posterior benefits and consequences from those engaging in it provides an important mechanism for securing cooperation. Resorting to methods from Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), here we analyse how prior commitments can also be adopted as a tool for enhancing coordination when its outcomes exhibit an asymmetric payoff structure, in both pairwise and multiparty interactions. Arguably, coordination is more complex to achieve than cooperation since there might be several desirable collective outcomes in a coordination problem (compared to mutual cooperation, the only desirable collective outcome in cooperation dilemmas). Our analysis, both analytically and via numerical simulations, shows that whether prior commitment would be a viable evolutionary mechanism for enhancing coordination and the overall population social welfare strongly depends on the collective benefit and severity of competition, and more importantly, how asymmetric benefits are resolved in a commitment deal. Moreover, in multiparty interactions, prior commitments prove to be crucial when a high level of group diversity is required for optimal coordination. The results are robust for different selection intensities. Overall, our analysis provides new insights into the complexity and beauty of behavioral evolution driven by humans' capacity for commitment, as well as for the design of self-organised and distributed multi-agent systems for ensuring coordination among autonomous agents

Institutional Incentives for the Evolution of Committed Cooperation: Ensuring Participation is as Important as Enhancing Compliance

Both conventional wisdom and empirical evidence suggests that arranging a prior commitment or agreement before an interaction enhances the chance of reaching mutual cooperation. Yet it is not clear what mechanisms can promote the participation in and compliance with such a commitment, especially when the former is costly and deviating from the latter is profitable. Prior work either considers regimented commitments where compensation is assumed enforceable from dishonest committers, or assume implicit commitments from every individual (so they are all in and thus being treated as such). Here we develop a theory of participation and compliance with respect to an explicit prior commitment under institutional incentives where individuals, at first, decide whether or not to join a cooperative agreement to play a one-shot social dilemma game. Using a mathematical model, we determine when participating in a costly commitment and complying with it, is an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) when playing against all other possible strategies, and results in high levels of cooperation in the population. We show that, given a sufficient budget for providing incentives, reward of commitment compliant behaviours better promotes cooperation than punishment of non-compliant ones. Moreover, by sparing part of this budget for rewarding those who are willing to participate in a commitment, the overall frequency of cooperation can be significantly enhanced, for both reward and punishment. Finally, we find that, surprisingly, the presence of errors in a participation decision favours evolutionary stability of commitment compliant strategies and higher levels of cooperation

When agreement-accepting free-riders are a necessary evil for the evolution of cooperation

Agreements and commitments have provided a novel mechanism to promote cooperation in social dilemmas in both one-shot and repeated games. Individuals requesting others to commit to cooperate (proposers) incur a cost, while their co-players are not necessarily required to pay any, allowing them to free-ride on the proposal investment cost (acceptors). Although there is a clear complementarity in these behaviours, no dynamic evidence is currently available that proves that they coexist in different forms of commitment creation. Using a stochastic evolutionary model allowing for mixed population states, we identify non-trivial roles of acceptors as well as the importance of intention recognition in commitments. In the one-shot prisoner's dilemma, alliances between proposers and acceptors are necessary to isolate defectors when proposers do not know the acceptance intentions of the others. However, when the intentions are clear beforehand, the proposers can emerge by themselves. In repeated games with noise, the incapacity of proposers and acceptors to set up alliances makes the emergence of the first harder whenever the latter are present. As a result, acceptors will exploit proposers and take over the population when an apology-forgiveness mechanism with too low apology cost is introduced, and hence reduce the overall cooperation level.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Centralized vs. Personalized Commitments and their influence on Cooperation in Group Interactions

Before engaging in a group venture agents may seekcommitments from other members in the group and,based on the level of participation (i.e. the numberof actually committed participants), decide whether itis worth joining the venture. Alternatively, agents candelegate this costly process to a (beneficent or non-costly) third-party, who helps seek commitments fromthe agents. Using methods from Evolutionary GameTheory, this paper shows that, in the context of PublicGoods Game, much higher levels of cooperationcan be achieved through such centralized commitmentmanagement. It provides a more efficient mechanismfor dealing with commitment free-riders, those who arenot willing to bear the cost of arranging commitmentswhilst enjoying the benefits provided by the paying commitment proposers.We show also that the participationlevel plays a crucial role in the decision of whetheran agreement should be formed; namely, it needs tobe more strict in the centralized system for the agreementto be formed; however, once it is done right, it ismuch more beneficial in terms of the level of cooperationas well as the attainable social welfare. In short, ouranalysis provides important insights for the design ofmulti-agent systems that rely on commitments to monitoragents’ cooperative behavior