Costly punishment does not always increase cooperation.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Wu JJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2765097 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:A fundamental question in social and biological sciences is whether self-governance is possible when individual and collective interests are in conflict. Free riding poses a major challenge to self-governance, and a prominent solution to this challenge has been altruistic punishment. However, this solution is ineffective when counter-punishments are possible and when social interactions are noisy. We set out to address these shortcomings, motivated by the fact that most people behave like conditional cooperators-individuals willing to cooperate if a critical number of others do so. In our evolutionary model, the population contains heterogeneous conditional cooperators whose decisions depend on past cooperation levels. The population plays a repeated public goods game in a moderately noisy environment where individuals can occasionally commit mistakes in their cooperative decisions and in their imitation of the role models' strategies. We show that, under moderate levels of noise, injecting a few altruists into the population triggers positive reciprocity among conditional cooperators, thereby providing a novel mechanism to establish stable cooperation. More broadly, our findings indicate that self-governance is possible while avoiding the detrimental effects of punishment, and suggest that society should focus on creating a critical amount of trust to harness the conditional nature of its members.
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Project description:The relative importance of social evolution theories such as kin selection, direct reciprocity and need-based transfers in explaining real-world cooperation is the source of much debate. Previous field studies of cooperation in human communities have revealed variability in the extent to which each of these theories explains human sociality in different contexts. We conducted multivariate social network analyses predicting costly cooperation-labouring on another household's farm-in 128 082 dyads of Mosuo farming households in southwest China. Through information-theoretic model selection, we tested the roles played by genealogical relatedness, affinal relationships (including reproductive partners), reciprocity, relative need, wealth, household size, spatial proximity and gift-giving in an economic game. The best-fitting model included all factors, along with interactions between relatedness and (i) reciprocity, (ii) need, (iii) the presence of own children in another household and (iv) proximity. Our results show how a real-world form of cooperation was driven by kinship. Households tended to help kin in need (but not needy non-kin) and travel further to help spatially distant relatives. Households were more likely to establish reciprocal relationships with distant relatives and non-kin but closer kin cooperated regardless of reciprocity. These patterns of kin-driven cooperation show the importance of inclusive fitness in understanding human social behaviour.
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Project description:Disruptions in social decision-making are becoming evident in many psychiatric conditions. These are studied using paradigms investigating the psychological mechanisms underlying interpersonal interactions, such as the Ultimatum Game (UG). Rejection behaviour in the UG represents altruistic punishment - the costly punishment of norm violators - but the mechanisms underlying it require clarification. To investigate the psychopharmacology of UG behaviour, we carried out two studies with healthy participants, employing serotonergic agonists: psilocybin (open-label, within-participant design, N?=?19) and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA; placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover design, N?=?20). We found that both MDMA and psilocybin reduced rejection of unfair offers (odds ratio: 0.57 and 0.42, respectively). The reduction in rejection rate following MDMA was associated with increased prosociality (R2?=?0.26, p?=?0.025). In the MDMA study, we investigated third-party decision-making and proposer behaviour. MDMA did not reduce rejection in the third-party condition, but produced an increase in the amount offered to others (Cohen's d?=?0.82). We argue that these compounds altered participants' conceptualisation of 'social reward', placing more emphasis on the direct relationship with interacting partners. With these compounds showing efficacy in drug-assisted psychotherapy, these studies are an important step in the further characterisation of their psychological effects.
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Project description:Socially imposed monogamy in humans is an evolutionary puzzle because it requires costly punishment by those who impose the norm. Moreover, most societies were--and are--polygynous; yet many larger human societies transitioned from polygyny to socially imposed monogamy beginning with the advent of agriculture and larger residential groups. We use a simulation model to explore how interactions between group size, sexually transmitted infection (STI) dynamics and social norms can explain the timing and emergence of socially imposed monogamy. Polygyny dominates when groups are too small to sustain STIs. However, in larger groups, STIs become endemic (especially in concurrent polygynist networks) and have an impact on fertility, thereby mediating multilevel selection. Punishment of polygynists improves monogamist fitness within groups by reducing their STI exposure, and between groups by enabling punishing monogamist groups to outcompete polygynists. This suggests pathways for the emergence of socially imposed monogamy, and enriches our understanding of costly punishment evolution.
| S-EPMC4832056 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Humans everywhere cooperate in groups to achieve benefits not attainable by individuals. Individual effort is often not automatically tied to a proportionate share of group benefits. This decoupling allows for free-riding, a strategy that (absent countermeasures) outcompetes cooperation. Empirically and formally, punishment potentially solves the evolutionary puzzle of group cooperation. Nevertheless, standard analyses appear to show that punishment alone is insufficient, because second-order free riders (those who cooperate but do not punish) can be shown to outcompete punishers. Consequently, many have concluded that other processes, such as cultural or genetic group selection, are required. Here, we present a series of agent-based simulations that show that group cooperation sustained by punishment easily evolves by individual selection when you introduce into standard models more biologically plausible assumptions about the social ecology and psychology of ancestral humans. We relax three unrealistic assumptions of past models. First, past models assume all punishers must punish every act of free riding in their group. We instead allow punishment to be probabilistic, meaning punishers can evolve to only punish some free riders some of the time. This drastically lowers the cost of punishment as group size increases. Second, most models unrealistically do not allow punishment to recruit labor; punishment merely reduces the punished agent's fitness. We instead realistically allow punished free riders to cooperate in the future to avoid punishment. Third, past models usually restrict agents to interact in a single group their entire lives. We instead introduce realistic social ecologies in which agents participate in multiple, partially overlapping groups. Because of this, punitive tendencies are more expressed and therefore more exposed to natural selection. These three moves toward greater model realism reveal that punishment and cooperation easily evolve by direct selection--even in sizeable groups.
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Project description:We study how communication affects cooperation in an experimental public goods environment with punishment and counter-punishment opportunities. Participants interacted over 30 rounds in fixed groups with fixed identifiers that allowed them to trace other group members' behavior over time. The two dimensions of communication we study are asking for a specific contribution level and having to express oneself when choosing to counter-punish. We conduct four experimental treatments, all involving a contribution stage, a punishment stage, and a counter-punishment stage in each round. In the first treatment communication is not possible at any of the stages. The second treatment allows participants to ask for a contribution level at the punishment stage and in the third treatment participants are required to send a message if they decide to counter-punish. The fourth combines the two communication channels of the second and third treatments. We find that the three treatments involving communication at any of the two relevant stages lead to significantly higher contributions than the baseline treatment. We find no difference between the three treatments with communication. We also relate our results to previous results from treatments without counter-punishment opportunities and do not find that the presence of counter-punishment leads to lower cooperation level. The overall pattern of results shows that given fixed identifiers the key factor is the presence of communication. Whenever communication is possible contributions and earnings are higher than when it is not, regardless of counter-punishment opportunities.
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