Impact of social punishment on cooperative behavior in complex networks.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Wang Z
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3808815 | biostudies-other | 2013
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:Theoretical models and experiments suggest that social networks may significantly impact the emergence and stability of cooperation in humans. Similarly, theoretical models and experiments have shown that punishing behavior can significantly increase cooperative behavior in individuals. However, how punishing impacts the effects of social networks on cooperation is not yet understood. Here, I examine a set of laboratory experiments in which participants choose to cooperate or defect under differing punishment arrangements. Through analysis of the experiment as a network, I evaluate how institutional arrangements affect the degree to which social networks promote cooperative behavior. The results show that cooperative behavior spreads from person-to-person in all versions of the game, but that in versions of the game with low-cost, high-impact punishment the influence both endures for more rounds and spreads further in the network. These results show that the extent to which cooperative behavior cascades is affected by the institutional arrangements that govern game play.
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Project description:In three experiments, we investigated the effect of unconscious social priming on human behavior in a choice reaction time task. Photographs of a basketball player passing a ball to the left/right were used as target stimuli. Participants had to respond to the pass direction either by a whole-body (complex) response or a button-press (simple) response. Visually masked stimuli, showing both a task-relevant cue (pass direction) and a task-irrelevant, social cue (gaze direction), were used as primes. Subliminal social priming was found for kinematic (center of pressure) and chronometric measures (response times): gaze direction in the primes affected responses to the pass direction in the targets. The social priming effect diminished when gaze information was unhelpful or even detrimental to the task. Social priming of a complex behavior does not require awareness or intentionality, indicating automatic processing. Nevertheless, it can be controlled by top-down, strategic processes.
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Project description:Individual acts of cooperation give rise to dynamic social networks. Traditionally, models for cooperation in structured populations are based on a separation of individual strategies and of population structure. Individuals adopt a strategy-typically cooperation or defection, which determines their behaviour toward their neighbours as defined by an interaction network. Here, we report a behavioural experiment that amalgamates strategies and structure to empirically investigate the dynamics of social networks. The action of paying a cost c to provide a benefit b is represented as a directed link point from the donor to the recipient. Participants can add and/or remove links to up to two recipients in each round. First, we show that dense networks emerge, where individuals are characterized by fairness: they receive to the same extent they provide. More specifically, we investigate how participants use information about the generosity and payoff of others to update their links. It turns out that aversion to payoff inequity was the most consistent update rule: adding links to individuals that are worse off and removing links to individuals that are better off. We then investigate the effect of direct reciprocation, showing that the possibility of direct reciprocation does not increase cooperation as compared to the treatment where participants are totally unaware of who is providing benefits to them.
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Project description:In spite of its relevance to the origin of complex networks, the interplay between form and function and its role during network formation remains largely unexplored. While recent studies introduce dynamics by considering rewiring processes of a pre-existent network, we study network growth and formation by proposing an evolutionary preferential attachment model, its main feature being that the capacity of a node to attract new links depends on a dynamical variable governed in turn by the node interactions. As a specific example, we focus on the problem of the emergence of cooperation by analyzing the formation of a social network with interactions given by the Prisoner's Dilemma. The resulting networks show many features of real systems, such as scale-free degree distributions, cooperative behavior and hierarchical clustering. Interestingly, results such as the cooperators being located mostly on nodes of intermediate degree are very different from the observations of cooperative behavior on static networks. The evolutionary preferential attachment mechanism points to an evolutionary origin of scale-free networks and may help understand similar feedback problems in the dynamics of complex networks by appropriately choosing the game describing the interaction of nodes.
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Project description:Punishment of free-riding has been implicated in the evolution of cooperation in humans, and yet mechanisms for punishment avoidance remain largely uninvestigated. Individual variation in these mechanisms may stem from variation in the serotonergic system, which modulates processing of aversive stimuli. Functional serotonin gene variants have been associated with variation in the processing of aversive stimuli and widely studied as risk factors for psychiatric disorders. We show that variants at the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) and serotonin 2A receptor gene (HTR2A) predict contributions to the public good in economic games, dependent upon whether contribution behavior can be punished. Participants with a variant at the serotonin transporter gene contribute more, leading to group-level differences in cooperation, but this effect dissipates in the presence of punishment. When contribution behavior can be punished, those with a variant at the serotonin 2A receptor gene contribute more than those without it. This variant also predicts a more stressful experience of the games. The diversity of institutions (including norms) that govern cooperation and punishment may create selective pressures for punishment avoidance that change rapidly across time and space. Variant-specific epigenetic regulation of these genes, as well as population-level variation in the frequencies of these variants, may facilitate adaptation to local norms of cooperation and punishment.
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Project description:It has been a long-lasting pursuit to promote cooperation, and this study aims to promote cooperation via the combination of social stratification and the spatial prisoners' dilemma game. It is previously assumed that agents share the identical payoff matrix, but the stratification or diversity exists and exerts influences in real societies. Thus, two additional classes, elites and scoundrels, derive from and coexist with the existing class, commons. Three classes have different payoff matrices. We construct a model where agents play the prisoners' dilemma game with neighbors. It indicates that stratification and temptation jointly influence cooperation. Temptation permanently reduces cooperation; elites play a positive role in promoting cooperation while scoundrels undermine it. As the temptation getting larger and larger, elites play a more and more positive and critical role while scoundrels' negative effect becomes weaker and weaker, and it is more obvious when temptation goes beyond its threshold.
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Project description:BackgroundOver 500 cases of school-based corporal punishment (CP) are reported annually in Japan. A major feature of CP in Japanese schools is its high prevalence during extracurricular sports activities.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to examine the influence of having suffered a CP-related injury on victims' later use of CP in an athletics environment.Participants and settingParticipants were 704 undergraduate students of a sports instructor training course who were recruited as volunteers during classes.MethodsA questionnaire on past experiences of CP and later perpetration of CP was administered to the participants. It was found that 31.3% of the students had experienced CP and 2.3% had perpetrated CP on others. We conducted logistic regression analyses with CP as an objective dependent variable and gender, grade and past CP experience (elementary, junior high school, or high school) as explanatory variables.ResultsThe results of the analysis revealed that having experienced CP had a significant relationship with the victims' perpetration of CP. Elementary school was the only life stage for which there was a significant correlation between having been a victim of CP and practicing it in the future.ConclusionsMany studies have explored the use of CP in families, while others have demonstrated that physical education students who received CP themselves are more likely to find CP an acceptable method of maintaining discipline. This is the first study that investigates whether students who experienced CP show a higher prevalence of CP perpetration. The findings indicate that experiencing CP in childhood is a risk factor for future use of CP. Proper care is required for children who have experienced CP at a young age.
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