Non-vertical cultural transmission, assortment and the evolution of cooperation.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Cohen D
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8150029 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The evolution of costly cooperation, where cooperators pay a personal cost to benefit others, requires that cooperators interact more frequently with other cooperators. This condition, called positive assortment, is known to occur in spatially-structured viscous populations, where individuals typically have low mobility and limited dispersal. However many social organisms across taxa, from cells and bacteria, to birds, fish and ungulates, are mobile, and live in populations with considerable inter-group mixing. In the absence of information regarding others' traits or conditional strategies, such mixing may inhibit assortment and limit the potential for cooperation to evolve. Here we employ spatially-explicit individual-based evolutionary simulations to incorporate costs and benefits of two coevolving costly traits: cooperative and local cohesive tendencies. We demonstrate that, despite possessing no information about others' traits or payoffs, mobility (via self-propulsion or environmental forcing) facilitates assortment of cooperators via a dynamically evolving difference in the cohesive tendencies of cooperators and defectors. We show analytically that this assortment can also be viewed in a multilevel selection framework, where selection for cooperation among emergent groups can overcome selection against cooperators within the groups. As a result of these dynamics, we find an oscillatory pattern of cooperation and defection that maintains cooperation even in the absence of well known mechanisms such as kin interactions, reciprocity, local dispersal or conditional strategies that require information on others' strategies or payoffs. Our results offer insights into differential adhesion based mechanisms for positive assortment and reveal the possibility of cooperative aggregations in dynamic fission-fusion populations.
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Project description:The success or failure of human collective action often depends on the cooperation tendencies of individuals in groups, and on the information that individuals have about each other's cooperativeness. However, it is unclear whether these two factors have an interactive effect on cooperation dynamics. Using a decision-making experiment, we confirm that groups comprising individuals with higher cooperation tendencies cooperate at a higher level than groups comprising individuals with low cooperation tendencies. Moreover, assorting individuals with similar cooperation tendency together affected behaviour so that the most cooperative individuals tended to cooperate more and the least cooperative individuals cooperated less, compared to their behaviour in randomly formed groups. In line with predictions of evolutionary models of cooperation, there was a strong positive association between individuals' cooperation tendency and success when groups were formed assortatively, whereas such association did not exist when groups were formed randomly. Surprisingly, information about group members' cooperativeness in assorted groups had no effect on cooperation levels. We discuss potential explanations for why information about cooperativeness of others may be disregarded in certain circumstances.
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Project description:Over the past several decades, we have argued that cultural evolution can facilitate the evolution of large-scale cooperation because it often leads to more rapid adaptation than genetic evolution, and, when multiple stable equilibria exist, rapid adaptation leads to variation among groups. Recently, Lehmann, Feldman, and colleagues have published several papers questioning this argument. They analyze models showing that cultural evolution can actually reduce the range of conditions under which cooperation can evolve and interpret these models as indicating that we were wrong to conclude that culture facilitated the evolution of human cooperation. In the main, their models assume that rates of cultural adaption are not strong enough compared to migration to maintain persistent variation among groups when payoffs create multiple stable equilibria. We show that Lehmann et al. reach different conclusions because they have made different assumptions. We argue that the assumptions that underlie our models are more consistent with the empirical data on large-scale cultural variation in humans than those of Lehmann et al., and thus, our models provide a more plausible account of the cultural evolution of human cooperation in large groups. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00265-010-1100-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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Project description:In this paper, we explore how experimental studies of cultural transmission in adult humans can address general questions regarding the 'who, what, when and how' of human cultural transmission, and consequently inform a theory of human cultural evolution. Three methods are discussed. The transmission chain method, in which information is passed along linear chains of participants, has been used to identify content biases in cultural transmission. These concern the kind of information that is transmitted. Several such candidate content biases have now emerged from the experimental literature. The replacement method, in which participants in groups are gradually replaced or moved across groups, has been used to study phenomena such as cumulative cultural evolution, cultural group selection and cultural innovation. The closed-group method, in which participants learn in groups with no replacement, has been used to explore issues such as who people choose to learn from and when they learn culturally as opposed to individually. A number of the studies reviewed here have received relatively little attention within their own disciplines, but we suggest that these, and future experimental studies of cultural transmission that build on them, can play an important role in a broader science of cultural evolution.
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Project description:Cooperation is ubiquitous in biological and social systems, even though cooperative behavior is often costly and at risk of exploitation by non-cooperators. Several studies have demonstrated that indirect reciprocity, whereby some members of a group observe the behaviors of their peers and use this information to discriminate against previously uncooperative agents in the future, can promote prosocial behavior. Some studies have shown that differential propensities of interacting among and between different types of agents (interaction assortment) can increase the effectiveness of indirect reciprocity. No previous studies have, however, considered differential propensities of observing the behaviors of different types of agents (information assortment). Furthermore, most previous studies have assumed that discriminators possess perfect information about others and incur no costs for gathering and storing this information. Here, we (1) consider both interaction assortment and information assortment, (2) assume discriminators have limited information about others, and (3) introduce a cost for information gathering and storage, in order to understand how the ability of discriminators to stabilize cooperation is affected by these steps toward increased realism. We report the following findings. First, cooperation can persist when agents preferentially interact with agents of other types or when discriminators preferentially observe other discriminators, even when they have limited information. Second, contrary to intuition, increasing the amount of information available to discriminators can exacerbate defection. Third, introducing costs of gathering and storing information makes it more difficult for discriminators to stabilize cooperation. Our study is one of only a few studies to date that show how negative interaction assortment can promote cooperation and broadens the set of circumstances in which it is know that cooperation can be maintained.
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