The evolution of judgement bias in indirect reciprocity.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Rankin DJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2660969 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Indirect reciprocity is a major mechanism in the maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals. Indirect reciprocity leads to conditional cooperation according to social norms that discriminate the good (those who deserve to be rewarded with help) and the bad (those who should be punished by refusal of help). Despite intensive research, however, there is no definitive consensus on what social norms best promote cooperation through indirect reciprocity, and it remains unclear even how those who refuse to help the bad should be assessed. Here, we propose a new simple norm called "Staying" that prescribes abstaining from assessment. Under the Staying norm, the image of the person who makes the decision to give help stays the same as in the last assessment if the person on the receiving end has a bad image. In this case, the choice about whether or not to give help to the potential receiver does not affect the image of the potential giver. We analyze the Staying norm in terms of evolutionary game theory and demonstrate that Staying is most effective in establishing cooperation compared to the prevailing social norms, which rely on constant monitoring and unconditional assessment. The application of Staying suggests that the strict application of moral judgment is limited.
| S-EPMC5288800 | biostudies-other
Project description:Direct and indirect reciprocity are good candidates to explain the fundamental problem of evolution of cooperation. We explore the conditions under which different types of reciprocity gain dominance and their performances in sustaining cooperation in the PD played on simple networks. We confirm that direct reciprocity gains dominance over indirect reciprocity strategies also in larger populations, as long as it has no memory constraints. In the absence of direct reciprocity, or when its memory is flawed, different forms of indirect reciprocity strategies are able to dominate and to support cooperation. We show that indirect reciprocity relying on social capital inherent in closed triads is the best competitor among them, outperforming indirect reciprocity that uses information from any source. Results hold in a wide range of conditions with different evolutionary update rules, extent of evolutionary pressure, initial conditions, population size, and density.
| S-EPMC6057955 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation based on social norms. This mechanism requires that individuals in a population observe and judge each other's behaviors. Individuals with a good reputation are more likely to receive help from others. Previous work suggests that indirect reciprocity is only effective when all relevant information is reliable and publicly available. Otherwise, individuals may disagree on how to assess others, even if they all apply the same social norm. Such disagreements can lead to a breakdown of cooperation. Here we explore whether the predominantly studied 'leading eight' social norms of indirect reciprocity can be made more robust by equipping them with an element of generosity. To this end, we distinguish between two kinds of generosity. According to assessment generosity, individuals occasionally assign a good reputation to group members who would usually be regarded as bad. According to action generosity, individuals occasionally cooperate with group members with whom they would usually defect. Using individual-based simulations, we show that the two kinds of generosity have a very different effect on the resulting reputation dynamics. Assessment generosity tends to add to the overall noise and allows defectors to invade. In contrast, a limited amount of action generosity can be beneficial in a few cases. However, even when action generosity is beneficial, the respective simulations do not result in full cooperation. Our results suggest that while generosity can favor cooperation when individuals use the most simple strategies of reciprocity, it is disadvantageous when individuals use more complex social norms.
| S-EPMC8408181 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Indirect reciprocity is a foundational mechanism of human cooperation. Existing models of indirect reciprocity fail to robustly support social cooperation: Image-scoring models fail to provide robust incentives, while social-standing models are not informationally robust. Here we provide a model of indirect reciprocity based on simple, decentralized records: Each individual's record depends on the individual's own past behavior alone, and not on the individual's partners' past behavior or their partners' partners' past behavior. When social dilemmas exhibit a coordination motive (or strategic complementarity), tolerant trigger strategies based on simple records can robustly support positive social cooperation and exhibit strong stability properties. In the opposite case of strategic substitutability, positive social cooperation cannot be robustly supported. Thus, the strength of short-run coordination motives in social dilemmas determines the prospects for robust long-run cooperation.
| S-EPMC7260940 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Indirect reciprocity involves cooperative acts towards strangers, either in response to their kindness to third parties (downstream) or after receiving kindness from others oneself (upstream). It is considered to be important for the evolution of cooperative behavior amongst humans. Though it has been widely studied theoretically, the empirical evidence of indirect reciprocity has thus far been limited and based solely on behavior in laboratory experiments. We provide evidence from an online environment where members can repeatedly ask and offer services to each other, free of charge. For the purpose of this study we created several new member profiles, which differ only in terms of their serving history. We then sent out a large number of service requests to different members from all over the world. We observe that a service request is more likely to be rewarded for those with a profile history of offering the service (to third parties) in the past. This provides clear evidence of (downstream) indirect reciprocity. We find no support for upstream indirect reciprocity (in this case, rewarding the service request after having previously received the service from third parties), however. Our evidence of downstream indirect reciprocity cannot be attributed to reputational effects concerning one's trustworthiness as a service user.
| S-EPMC4820101 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cooperation is a fundamental human trait but our understanding of how it functions remains incomplete. Indirect reciprocity is a particular case in point, where one-shot donations are made to unrelated beneficiaries without any guarantee of payback. Existing insights are largely from two independent perspectives: i) individual-level cognitive behaviour in decision making, and ii) identification of conditions that favour evolution of cooperation. We identify a fundamental connection between these two areas by examining social comparison as a means through which indirect reciprocity can evolve. Social comparison is well established as an inherent human disposition through which humans navigate the social world by self-referential evaluation of others. Donating to those that are at least as reputable as oneself emerges as a dominant heuristic, which represents aspirational homophily. This heuristic is found to be implicitly present in the current knowledge of conditions that favour indirect reciprocity. The effective social norms for updating reputation are also observed to support this heuristic. We hypothesise that the cognitive challenge associated with social comparison has contributed to cerebral expansion and the disproportionate human brain size, consistent with the social complexity hypothesis. The findings have relevance for the evolution of autonomous systems that are characterised by one-shot interactions.
| S-EPMC4981842 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Moral rules allow humans to cooperate by indirect reciprocity. Yet, it is not clear which moral rules best implement indirect reciprocity and are favoured by natural selection. Previous studies either considered only public assessment, where individuals are deemed good or bad by all others, or compared a subset of possible strategies. Here we fill this gap by identifying which rules are evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) among all possible moral rules while considering private assessment. We develop an analytical model describing the frequency of long-term cooperation, determining when a strategy can be invaded by another. We show that there are numerous ESSs in absence of errors, which however cease to exist when errors are present. We identify the underlying properties of cooperative ESSs. Overall, this paper provides a first exhaustive evolutionary invasion analysis of moral rules considering private assessment. Moreover, this model is extendable to incorporate higher-order rules and other processes.
| S-EPMC8654852 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cooperation is a hallmark of human society. Humans often cooperate with strangers even if they will not meet each other again. This so-called indirect reciprocity enables large-scale cooperation among nonkin and can occur based on a reputation mechanism or as a succession of pay-it-forward behavior. Here, we provide the functional and anatomical neural evidence for two distinct mechanisms governing the two types of indirect reciprocity. Cooperation occurring as reputation-based reciprocity specifically recruited the precuneus, a region associated with self-centered cognition. During such cooperative behavior, the precuneus was functionally connected with the caudate, a region linking rewards to behavior. Furthermore, the precuneus of a cooperative subject had a strong resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) with the caudate and a large gray matter volume. In contrast, pay-it-forward reciprocity recruited the anterior insula (AI), a brain region associated with affective empathy. The AI was functionally connected with the caudate during cooperation occurring as pay-it-forward reciprocity, and its gray matter volume and rsFC with the caudate predicted the tendency of such cooperation. The revealed difference is consistent with the existing results of evolutionary game theory: although reputation-based indirect reciprocity robustly evolves as a self-interested behavior in theory, pay-it-forward indirect reciprocity does not on its own. The present study provides neural mechanisms underlying indirect reciprocity and suggests that pay-it-forward reciprocity may not occur as myopic profit maximization but elicit emotional rewards.
| S-EPMC3964069 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Social indirect reciprocity seems to be crucial in enabling large-scale cooperative networks among genetically unrelated individuals in humans. However, there are relatively few studies on social indirect reciprocity in children compared to adults. Investigating whether young children have a behavioral tendency toward social indirect reciprocity will help us understand how and when the fundamental ability to form cooperative relationships among adults is acquired. Using naturalistic observation at a nursery school, this study examined whether 5- to 6-year-olds show a behavioral tendency to engage in social indirect reciprocity in response to their peers' prosocial behavior toward a third party. The results revealed that bystander children tended to display prosocial behavior toward their peers more frequently after observing these peers' prosocial behavior toward third-party peers, compared with control situations; this suggests that 5- to 6-year-olds may have an essential behavioral tendency to establish social indirect reciprocity when interacting with peers in their daily lives. In addition, bystanders tended to display affiliative behavior after observing focal children's prosocial behavior. In other words, observing peers' prosocial behavior toward third-party peers evoked bystanders' positive emotions toward the helpers. Considering both the present results and previous findings, we speculate that in preschoolers, such positive emotions might mediate the increase in the bystander's prosocial behavior toward the helper. In addition, an intuitional emotional process plays an important role in the preschooler's behavioral tendency toward social indirect reciprocity in natural interactions with peers.
| S-EPMC3737253 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for cooperation based on shared moral systems and individual reputations. It assumes that members of a community routinely observe and assess each other and that they use this information to decide who is good or bad, and who deserves cooperation. When information is transmitted publicly, such that all community members agree on each other's reputation, previous research has highlighted eight crucial moral systems. These "leading-eight" strategies can maintain cooperation and resist invasion by defectors. However, in real populations individuals often hold their own private views of others. Once two individuals disagree about their opinion of some third party, they may also see its subsequent actions in a different light. Their opinions may further diverge over time. Herein, we explore indirect reciprocity when information transmission is private and noisy. We find that in the presence of perception errors, most leading-eight strategies cease to be stable. Even if a leading-eight strategy evolves, cooperation rates may drop considerably when errors are common. Our research highlights the role of reliable information and synchronized reputations to maintain stable moral systems.
| S-EPMC6275544 | biostudies-literature