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Evolution of public cooperation in a monitored society with implicated punishment and within-group enforcement.

ABSTRACT: Monitoring with implicated punishment is common in human societies to avert freeriding on common goods. But is it effective in promoting public cooperation? We show that the introduction of monitoring and implicated punishment is indeed effective, as it transforms the public goods game to a coordination game, thus rendering cooperation viable in infinite and finite well-mixed populations. We also show that the addition of within-group enforcement further promotes the evolution of public cooperation. However, although the group size in this context has nonlinear effects on collective action, an intermediate group size is least conductive to cooperative behaviour. This contradicts recent field observations, where an intermediate group size was declared optimal with the conjecture that group-size effects and within-group enforcement are responsible. Our theoretical research thus clarifies key aspects of monitoring with implicated punishment in human societies, and additionally, it reveals fundamental group-size effects that facilitate prosocial collective action.

SUBMITTER: Chen X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4657016 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evolution of public cooperation in a monitored society with implicated punishment and within-group enforcement.

Chen Xiaojie X Sasaki Tatsuya T Perc Matjaž M

Scientific reports 20151124

Monitoring with implicated punishment is common in human societies to avert freeriding on common goods. But is it effective in promoting public cooperation? We show that the introduction of monitoring and implicated punishment is indeed effective, as it transforms the public goods game to a coordination game, thus rendering cooperation viable in infinite and finite well-mixed populations. We also show that the addition of within-group enforcement further promotes the evolution of public cooperat ...[more]

PMID: 26597333

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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.

Dataset Information

Evolution of public cooperation in a monitored society with implicated punishment and within-group enforcement.

Publications

Evolution of public cooperation in a monitored society with implicated punishment and within-group enforcement.

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