Wisdom of groups promotes cooperation in evolutionary social dilemmas.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Szolnoki A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3418638 | biostudies-other | 2012
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Similar Datasets
Project description:The present research investigates the role of intuitive mental processing on cooperation in experimental games involving structural inequality. Results from an experiment using conceptual priming to induce intuitive mental processing provide the first evidence that cooperation is promoted by intuition in an asymmetric context that distributes the gains from cooperation unequally among a group. Therefore, the results extend our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of human cooperation by demonstrating the robustness of intuitive cooperation in games involving structural inequality regarding asymmetric gains from cooperation. Additionally, the results provide the first successful conceptual replication of the intuition-cooperation link using conceptual priming, therefore also contributing to the debate about the validity of previous research in other contexts. Taken together, the present research contributes to the literature on psychological and institutional mechanisms that promote cooperation.
| S-EPMC4496099 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Direct reciprocity and conditional cooperation are important mechanisms to prevent free riding in social dilemmas. However, in large groups, these mechanisms may become ineffective because they require single individuals to have a substantial influence on their peers. However, the recent discovery of zero-determinant strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma suggests that we may have underestimated the degree of control that a single player can exert. Here, we develop a theory for zero-determinant strategies for iterated multiplayer social dilemmas, with any number of involved players. We distinguish several particularly interesting subclasses of strategies: fair strategies ensure that the own payoff matches the average payoff of the group; extortionate strategies allow a player to perform above average; and generous strategies let a player perform below average. We use this theory to describe strategies that sustain cooperation, including generalized variants of Tit-for-Tat and Win-Stay Lose-Shift. Moreover, we explore two models that show how individuals can further enhance their strategic options by coordinating their play with others. Our results highlight the importance of individual control and coordination to succeed in large groups.
| S-EPMC4246307 | biostudies-literature
Project description:What makes people willing to pay costs to benefit others? Does such cooperation require effortful self-control, or do automatic, intuitive processes favor cooperation? Time pressure has been shown to increase cooperative behavior in Public Goods Games, implying a predisposition towards cooperation. Consistent with the hypothesis that this predisposition results from the fact that cooperation is typically advantageous outside the lab, it has further been shown that the time pressure effect is undermined by prior experience playing lab games (where selfishness is the more advantageous strategy). Furthermore, a recent study found that time pressure increases cooperation even in a game framed as a competition, suggesting that the time pressure effect is not the result of social norm compliance. Here, we successfully replicate these findings, again observing a positive effect of time pressure on cooperation in a competitively framed game, but not when using the standard cooperative framing. These results suggest that participants' intuitions favor cooperation rather than norm compliance, and also that simply changing the framing of the Public Goods Game is enough to make it appear novel to participants and thus to restore the time pressure effect.
| S-EPMC4281206 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Direct reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for cooperation in social dilemmas. The very logic of reciprocity, however, seems to require that individuals are symmetric, and that everyone has the same means to influence each others' payoffs. Yet in many applications, individuals are asymmetric. Herein, we study the effect of asymmetry in linear public good games. Individuals may differ in their endowments (their ability to contribute to a public good) and in their productivities (how effective their contributions are). Given the individuals' productivities, we ask which allocation of endowments is optimal for cooperation. To this end, we consider two notions of optimality. The first notion focuses on the resilience of cooperation. The respective endowment distribution ensures that full cooperation is feasible even under the most adverse conditions. The second notion focuses on efficiency. The corresponding endowment distribution maximizes group welfare. Using analytical methods, we fully characterize these two endowment distributions. This analysis reveals that both optimality notions favor some endowment inequality: More productive players ought to get higher endowments. Yet the two notions disagree on how unequal endowments are supposed to be. A focus on resilience results in less inequality. With additional simulations, we show that the optimal endowment allocation needs to account for both the resilience and the efficiency of cooperation.
| S-EPMC10927524 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cooperation is a very common, yet not fully-understood phenomenon in natural and human systems. The introduction of a network within the population is known to affect the outcome of cooperative dynamics, allowing for the survival of cooperation in adverse scenarios. Recently, the introduction of multiplex networks has yet again modified the expectations for the outcome of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, compared to the monoplex case. However, much remains unstudied regarding other social dilemmas on multiplex, as well as the unexplored microscopic underpinnings of it. In this paper, we systematically study the evolution of cooperation in all four games in the T-S plane on multiplex. More importantly, we find some remarkable and previously unknown features in the microscopic organization of the strategies, that are responsible for the important differences between cooperative dynamics in monoplex and multiplex. Specifically, we find that in the stationary state, there are individuals that play the same strategy in all layers (coherent), and others that don't (incoherent). This second group of players is responsible for the surprising fact of a non full-cooperation in the Harmony Game on multiplex, never observed before, as well as a higher-than-expected cooperation rates in some regions of the other three social dilemmas.
| S-EPMC5386185 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Social dilemmas are central to human society. Depletion of natural resources, climate protection, security of energy supply, and workplace collaborations are all examples of social dilemmas. Since cooperative behaviour in a social dilemma is individually costly, Nash equilibrium predicts that humans should not cooperate. Yet experimental studies show that people do cooperate even in anonymous one-shot interactions. In spite of the large number of participants in many modern social dilemmas, little is known about the effect of group size on cooperation. Does larger group size favour or prevent cooperation? We address this problem both experimentally and theoretically. Experimentally, we find that there is no general answer: it depends on the strategic situation. Specifically, we find that larger groups are more cooperative in the Public Goods game, but less cooperative in the N-person Prisoner's dilemma. Theoretically, we show that this behaviour is not consistent with either the Fehr &Schmidt model or (a one-parameter version of) the Charness &Rabin model, but it is consistent with the cooperative equilibrium model introduced by the second author.
| S-EPMC4300455 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Social dilemmas force players to balance between personal and collective gain. In many dilemmas, such as elected governments negotiating climate-change mitigation measures, the decisions are made not by individual players but by their representatives. However, the behaviour of representatives in social dilemmas has not been investigated experimentally. Here inspired by the negotiations for greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, we experimentally study a collective-risk social dilemma that involves representatives deciding on behalf of their fellow group members. Representatives can be re-elected or voted out after each consecutive collective-risk game. Selfish players are preferentially elected and are hence found most frequently in the 'representatives' treatment. Across all treatments, we identify the selfish players as extortioners. As predicted by our mathematical model, their steadfast strategies enforce cooperation from fair players who finally compensate almost completely the deficit caused by the extortionate co-players. Everybody gains, but the extortionate representatives and their groups gain the most.
| S-EPMC4786683 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cooperation is more likely when individuals can choose their interaction partner. However, partner choice may be detrimental in unequal societies, in which individuals differ in available resources and productivity, and thus in their attractiveness as interaction partners. Here we experimentally examine this conjecture in a repeated public goods game. Individuals (n = 336), participating in groups of eight participants, are assigned a high or low endowment and a high or low productivity factor (the value that their cooperation generates), creating four unique participant types. On each round, individuals are either assigned a partner (assigned partner condition) or paired based on their self-indicated preference for a partner type (partner choice condition). Results show that under partner choice, individuals who were assigned a high endowment and high productivity almost exclusively interact with each other, forcing other individuals into less valuable pairs. Consequently, pre-existing resource differences between individuals increase. These findings show how partner choice in social dilemmas can amplify resource inequality.
| S-EPMC10575984 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Is it rational for selfish individuals to cooperate? The conventional answer based on analysis of games such as the Prisoners Dilemma (PD) is that it is not, even though mutual cooperation results in a better outcome for all. This incompatibility between individual rationality and collective benefit lies at the heart of questions about the evolution of cooperation, as illustrated by PD and similar games. Here, we argue that this apparent incompatibility is due to an inconsistency in the standard Nash framework for analyzing non-cooperative games and propose a new paradigm, that of the co-action equilibrium. As in the Nash solution, agents know that others are just as rational as them and taking this into account lead them to realize that others will independently adopt the same strategy, in contrast to the idea of unilateral deviation central to Nash equilibrium thinking. Co-action equilibrium results in better collective outcomes for games representing social dilemmas, with relatively "nicer" strategies being chosen by rational selfish individuals. In particular, the dilemma of PD gets resolved within this framework, suggesting that cooperation can evolve in nature as the rational outcome even for selfish agents, without having to take recourse to additional mechanisms for promoting it.
| S-EPMC4533599 | biostudies-other
Project description:An often-replicated result in the experimental literature on social dilemmas is that a large share of subjects choose conditionally cooperative strategies. Cooperation generated by such choices is notoriously unstable, as individuals reduce their contributions to the public good in reaction to other subjects' free-riding. This has led to the widely-held conclusion that cooperation observed in experiments (and its decline) is mostly driven by imperfect reciprocity. In this study, we explore the possibility that the type of reciprocally cooperative choices observed in experiments may themselves evolve over time. We do so by observing the evolution of subjects' choices in an anonymously repeated social dilemma. Our results show that a significant fraction of reciprocally cooperative subjects become unconditional defectors in the course of the experiment, while the reverse is rarely observed.
| S-EPMC7423935 | biostudies-literature