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Evolution of coordinated punishment to enforce cooperation from an unbiased strategy space.

ABSTRACT: The emergence and maintenance of punishment to protect the commons remains an open puzzle in social and biological sciences. Even in societies where pro-social punishing is common, some individuals seek to cheat the system if they see a chance to do so-and public goods are often maintained in spite of cheaters who do not contribute. We present a model accounting for all possible strategies in a public goods game with punishment. While most models of punishment restrict the set of possible behaviours, excluding seemingly paradoxical anti-social strategies from the start, we show that these strategies can play an important role in explaining large-scale cooperation as observed in human societies. We find that coordinated punishment can emerge from individual interactions, but the stability of the associated institutions is limited owing to anti-social and opportunistic behaviour. In particular, coordinated anti-social punishment can undermine cooperation if individuals cannot condition their behaviour on the existence of institutions that punish. Only when we allow for observability and conditional behaviours do anti-social strategies no longer threaten cooperation. This is due to a stable coexistence of a minority supporting pro-social institutions and those who only cooperate if such institutions are in place. This minority of supporters is enough to guarantee substantial cooperation under a wide range of conditions. Our findings resonate with the empirical observation that public goods are resilient to opportunistic cheaters in large groups of unrelated individuals. They also highlight the importance of letting evolution, and not modellers, decide which strategies matter.

SUBMITTER: Garcia J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6685031 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evolution of coordinated punishment to enforce cooperation from an unbiased strategy space.

García Julián J Traulsen Arne A

Journal of the Royal Society, Interface 20190724 156

The emergence and maintenance of punishment to protect the commons remains an open puzzle in social and biological sciences. Even in societies where pro-social punishing is common, some individuals seek to cheat the system if they see a chance to do so-and public goods are often maintained in spite of cheaters who do not contribute. We present a model accounting for all possible strategies in a public goods game with punishment. While most models of punishment restrict the set of possible behavi ...[more]

PMID: 31337305

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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 coordinated punishment to enforce cooperation from an unbiased strategy space.

Publications

Evolution of coordinated punishment to enforce cooperation from an unbiased strategy space.

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