20 research outputs found
The evolution of cooperation by social exclusion
The exclusion of freeriders from common privileges or public acceptance is
widely found in the real world. Current models on the evolution of cooperation
with incentives mostly assume peer sanctioning, whereby a punisher imposes
penalties on freeriders at a cost to itself. It is well known that such costly
punishment has two substantial difficulties. First, a rare punishing cooperator
barely subverts the asocial society of freeriders, and second, natural
selection often eliminates punishing cooperators in the presence of
non-punishing cooperators (namely, "second-order" freeriders). We present a
game-theoretical model of social exclusion in which a punishing cooperator can
exclude freeriders from benefit sharing. We show that such social exclusion can
overcome the above-mentioned difficulties even if it is costly and stochastic.
The results do not require a genetic relationship, repeated interaction,
reputation, or group selection. Instead, only a limited number of freeriders
are required to prevent the second-order freeriders from eroding the social
immune system.Comment: 28 pages, 3 figures, supplementary material (materials and methods,
and 6 supplementary figures
The evolution of cooperation by social exclusion
The exclusion of freeriders from common privileges 14 or public acceptance is widely found in the real world. Current models on the evolution of cooperation with incentives mostly assume peer sanctioning, whereby a punisher imposes penalties on freeriders at a cost to itself. It is well known that such costly punishment has two substantial difficulties. First, a rare punishing cooperator barely subverts the asocial society of freeriders, and second, natural selection often eliminates punishing cooperators in the presence of non-punishing cooperators (namely, "second-order" freeriders). We present a game-theoretical model of social exclusion in which a punishing cooperator can exclude freeriders from benefit sharing. We show that such social exclusion can overcome the above-mentioned difficulties even if it is costly and stochastic. The results do not require a genetic relationship, repeated interaction, reputation, or group selection. Instead, only a limited number of freeriders are required to prevent the second-order freeriders from eroding the social immune system
The evolution of cooperation through institutional incentives and optional participation
Rewards and penalties are common practical tools that can be used to promote
cooperation in social institutions. The evolution of cooperation under reward
and punishment incentives in joint enterprises has been formalized and
investigated, mostly by using compulsory public good games. Recently, Sasaki et
al. (2012, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:1165-1169) considered optional
participation as well as institutional incentives and described how the
interplay between these mechanisms affects the evolution of cooperation in
public good games. Here, we present a full classification of these evolutionary
dynamics. Specifically, whenever penalties are large enough to cause the
bi-stability of both cooperation and defection in cases in which participation
in the public good game is compulsory, these penalties will ultimately result
in cooperation if participation in the public good game is optional. The global
stability of coercion-based cooperation in this optional case contrasts
strikingly with the bi-stability that is observed in the compulsory case. We
also argue that optional participation is not so effective at improving
cooperation under rewards.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure
Evolution of sanctioning systems and opting out of games of life
In explaining altruistic cooperation and punishment, the challenging riddle
is how transcendental rules can emerge within the empirical world. Recent
game-theoretical studies show that pool punishment, in particular second-order
punishment, plays a key role in understanding the evolution of cooperation.
Second-order pool punishment, however, is tautological in nature: the
punishment system itself is caused by its own effects. The emergence of pool
punishment poses a logical conundrum that to date has been overlooked in the
study of the evolution of social norms and institutions. Here we tackle the
issue by considering the interplay of (a) cognitive biases in reasoning and (b)
Agamben's notion of homo sacer (Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power
and Bare Life. Stanford Univ. Press), that is, a person who may be killed
without legal consequence. Based on cognitive disposition of reversing the
cause-and-effect relationship, then we propose a new system: preemptive
punishment of homo sacers. This action can lead to retrospectively forming
moral assessment in particular for second-order pool punishment.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur
Central governance based on monitoring and reporting solves the collective-risk social dilemma
Monitoring and reporting incorrect acts are pervasive for maintaining human
cooperation, but in theory it is unclear how they influence each other. To
explore their possible interactions we consider spatially structured population
where individuals face the collective-risk social dilemma. In our minimal model
cooperator players report defection according to the loss of their interests.
In parallel we assume a monitoring institution that monitors all group member
and identifies wrong behavior with a certain probability. In response to these
feedbacks a sanctioning institution develops punishment schemes by imposing
fines on related defector players stochastically. By means of Monte Carlo
simulations, we find that the introduction of monitoring and reporting
mechanisms can greatly promote the evolution of cooperation and there exists a
sudden change of the cooperation level by varying model parameters, which can
lead to an outbreak of cooperation for solving the collective-risk social
dilemma.Comment: 6 figure
Interpersonal and Ideological Kindness: A Biocultural Approach
In accordance with Richard Dawkins’ materialist “selfish gene” theory of human behavior, altruism is a subject matter that is treated conservatively by biologists, whose understanding of the human version of altruism tends toward mutualistic and sometimes reputation-based explanations of charity, kindness, and helping. Trivers (1971) first stated that non-kin altruism could evolve if altruistic behavior is balanced between partners over time, implicating a strictly mutualistic domain for kindness. But kindness herein is defined, beyond mere mutualism or reciprocity, as “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.” Further, kindness tends to have an action-oriented dimension, as in Goetz et al.’s (2010) definition of compassion, denoting helpfulness, the reduction of another’s suffering, or self-sacrifice.
In this paper, I will employ a biocultural approach in exploring the psychological and neuroscientific data on the evolutionary aspect of social behavior as it pertains to kindness. First, I will draw on evolutionary theories of cooperation in suggesting that an individual and ideological ethos of kindness could have evolved as an adaptive orientation that, in a Durkheimian sense, preempted ostracism and cemented alliances as a beneficial balance to the fitness risks inherent in altruism. Then, consulting data on the neurochemical profiles of dopamine and oxytocin, I will describe the sort of human psychological variation that would reveal a complimentary continuum of evolved social proclivities, from selfish to giving. In proposing that non-reciprocal kindness indeed exists, however, I argue that its presence in human societies is statistically rare, as assumptions about human biology suggest. This study thus concludes with a cautious message about the human condition: while the rareness of kindness should have a profoundly fundamental explanatory value in social analysis, scientific confirmation of its fragility would recommend further scholarship designed to highlight its exceptional biological position vis-à-vis the selfish gene
Reputation based on punishment rather than generosity allows for evolution of cooperation in sizable groups
Cooperation among unrelated individuals can arise if decisions to help others can be based on reputation. While working for dyadic interactions, reputation-use in social dilemmas involving many individuals (e.g. public goods games) becomes increasingly difficult as groups become larger and errors more frequent. Reputation is therefore believed to have played a minor role for the evolution of cooperation in collective action dilemmas such as those faced by early humans. Here, we show in computer simulations that a reputation system based on punitive actions can overcome these problems and, compared to reputation system based on generous actions, (i) is more likely to lead to the evolution of cooperation in sizable groups, (ii) more effectively sustains cooperation within larger groups, and (iii) is more robust to errors in reputation assessment. Punishment and punishment reputation could therefore have played crucial roles in the evolution of cooperation within larger groups of humans
Competitions between prosocial exclusions and punishments in finite populations
Prosocial punishment has been proved to be a powerful mean to promote
cooperation. Recent studies have found that social exclusion, which indeed can
be regarded as a kind of punishment, can also support cooperation. However, if
prosocial punishment and exclusion are both present, it is still unclear which
strategy is more advantageous to curb free-riders. Here we first study the
direct competition between different types of punishment and exclusion. We find
that pool (peer) exclusion can always outperform pool (peer) punishment both in
the optional and in the compulsory public goods game, no matter whether
second-order sanctioning is considered or not. Furthermore, peer exclusion does
better than pool exclusion both in the optional and in the compulsory game, but
the situation is reversed in the presence of second-order exclusion. Finally,
we extend the competition among all possible sanctioning strategies and find
that peer exclusion can outperform all other strategies in the absence of
second-order exclusion and punishment, while pool exclusion prevails when
second-order sanctioning is possible. Our results demonstrate that exclusion is
a more powerful strategy than punishment for the resolution of social dilemmas