Cooperative
The joker effect: Cooperation driven by destructive agents
Alex Arenas et al.
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 21 June 2011, Pages 113-119
Abstract:
Understanding the emergence of cooperation is a central issue in evolutionary game theory. The hardest setup for the attainment of cooperation in a population of individuals is the Public Goods game in which cooperative agents generate a common good at their own expenses, while defectors "free-ride" this good. Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. Previous results have shown that introducing reputation, allowing for volunteer participation, punishing defectors, rewarding cooperators or structuring agents, can enhance cooperation. Here we present a model which shows how the introduction of rare, malicious agents - that we term jokers - performing just destructive actions on the other agents induce bursts of cooperation. The appearance of jokers promotes a rock-paper-scissors dynamics, where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation.
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Experiment on the Demand for Encompassment
Daniel Klein et al.
George Mason University Working Paper, March 2011
Abstract:
The idea of political community is appealing on a gut level. Hayek suggested that certain genes and instincts still dispose us toward the ethos and mentality of the hunter-gatherer band, and that modern forms of political collectivism have, in part, been atavistic reassertions of such tendencies. Picking up on Hayek, Klein (2005) has suggested a combination of yearnings: 1) a yearning for coordinated sentiment (like Smithian sympathy), and 2) a yearning that the sentiment encompass the whole group. This paper reports on an experiment designed to explore the demand for encompassment by having subjects sing together. In each trial, one person in the room was designated not to sing unless every one of the others in the room had made a payment sufficient so as to have that person sing. Subjects chose to sacrifice money to achieve encompassment 47.4 percent of the time, with 59.6 percent of the subjects doing so in at least one trial. An exit questionnaire showed that subjects' chief reason for making such a sacrifice was a belief that the singing would be more enjoyable if it encompassed the whole group, and reported enjoyment is significantly higher with encompassment. We discuss the experiment as a parable for a penchant toward political collectivism.
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Saved by the blush: Being trusted despite defecting
Corine Dijk et al.
Emotion, April 2011, Pages 313-319
Abstract:
This study examined whether blushing after a sociomoral transgression remediates trustworthiness in an interdependent context. Participants (N = 196) played a computerized prisoner's dilemma game with a virtual opponent who defected in the second round of the game. After the defection, a photograph of the opponent was shown, displaying a blushing or a nonblushing face. In a subsequent Trust Task, the blushing opponent was entrusted with more money than the nonblushing opponent. In further support of the alleged remedial properties of the blush, participants also indicated that they trusted the blushing opponent more, expected a lower probability that she would defect again, and judged the blushing opponent more positively.
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Sabotaging the deal: The way relational concerns undermine negotiators
Kathleen O'Connor & Josh Arnold
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We addressed the questions of how and to what end negotiators sacrifice their economic outcomes in exchange for hoped-for relationship gains with the other party. We predicted that negotiators' chronic belongingness needs - fundamental to human beings - would undercut the economic value of their deals. Moreover, we tested two mechanisms by which this occurs. Belongingness needs encourage negotiators to reduce their economic ambitions ahead of time, and they interfered with negotiators' attention to the substantive issues on the table. Rather than finding that partners were able to exploit negotiators' belongingness needs for their own economic gains, we found that their partners were left worse off. If negotiators were making a calculation initially to trade economic gains for relationship gains, we did not find evidence that this paid off with a partner who especially wanted to work with the focal negotiator in the future. We conclude that belongingness needs lead negotiators to sabotage their economic outcomes without any clear benefits to the relationships these negotiators are keen to build.
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James Andreoni & Laura Gee
NBER Working Paper, May 2011
Abstract:
We present and experimentally test a mechanism that provides a simple, natural, low cost, and realistic solution to the problem of compliance with socially determined efficient actions, such as contributing to a public good. We note that small self-governing organizations often place enforcement in the hands of an appointed leader - the department chair, the building superintendent, the team captain. This hired gun, we show, need only punish the least compliant group member, and then only punish this person enough so that the person would have rather been the second least compliant. We show experimentally this mechanism, despite having very small penalties out of equilibrium, reaches the full compliance equilibrium almost instantly.
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Gun For Hire: Does Delegated Enforcement Crowd out Peer Punishment in Giving to Public Goods?
James Andreoni & Laura Gee
NBER Working Paper, May 2011
Abstract:
This paper compares two methods to encourage socially optimal provision of a public good. We compare the efficacy of vigilante justice, as represented by peer-to-peer punishment, to delegated policing, as represented by the "hired gun" mechanism, to deter free riding and improve group welfare. The "hired gun" mechanism (Andreoni and Gee, 2011) is an example of a low cost device that promotes complete compliances and minimal enforcement as the unique Nash equilibrium. We find that subjects are willing to pay to hire a delegated policing mechanism over 70% of the time, and that this mechanism increases welfare between 15% to 40%. Moreover, the lion's share of the welfare gain comes because the hired gun crowds out vigilante peer-to-peer punishments.
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Athena Aktipis
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The evolution of cooperation through partner choice mechanisms is often thought to involve relatively complex cognitive abilities. Using agent-based simulations, I model a simple partner choice rule, the "Walk Away" rule, where individuals stay in groups that provide higher returns (by virtue of having more cooperators), and "Walk Away" from groups providing low returns. Implementing this conditional movement rule in a public goods game leads to a number of interesting findings: (a) cooperators have a selective advantage when thresholds are high, corresponding to low tolerance for defectors, (b) high thresholds lead to high initial rates of movement and low final rates of movement (after selection), and (c) as cooperation is selected, the population undergoes a spatial transition from high migration (and many small and ephemeral groups) to low migration (and large and stable groups). These results suggest that the very simple "Walk Away" rule of leaving uncooperative groups can favor the evolution of cooperation and that cooperation can evolve in populations in which individuals are able to move in response to local social conditions. A diverse array of organisms are able to leave degraded physical or social environments. The ubiquitous nature of conditional movement suggests that "Walk Away" dynamics may play an important role in the evolution of social behavior in both cognitively complex and cognitively simple organisms.
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Electrodes as social glue: Measuring heart rate promotes giving in the trust game
Paul Van Lange et al.
International Journal of Psychophysiology, June 2011, Pages 246-250
Abstract:
While physiological measures are increasingly used to help us understand the workings of interpersonal trust (and related behaviors), we know very little about the effects of such measures on trust. We examined the effects of a classic measure, the measurement of heart rate using a standard protocol, on behavioral trust in dyads of women who did not know each other. Behavioral trust was assessed in the trust game, in which the trustor decides how much money from their subject payment to give to a trustee, while knowing that the experimenter triples that amount before giving it to the trustee, after which the trustee decides how much money to return to the trustor. As predicted, we found greater levels of behavioral trust in the trust game, as well as greater returns by the trustees (which were accounted for by trustor's giving), in the heart rate (HR) than in no heart rate (NHR) measurement condition. Parallel findings were observed for self-reported trust. Findings are discussed in terms of the idea that the elusive effects of a protocol for measuring heart rate can cause pronounced effects on subsequent social interactions via enhanced interpersonal trust.
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Elephants know when they need a helping trunk in a cooperative task
Joshua Plotnik et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 March 2011, Pages 5116-5121
Abstract:
Elephants are widely assumed to be among the most cognitively advanced animals, even though systematic evidence is lacking. This void in knowledge is mainly due to the danger and difficulty of submitting the largest land animal to behavioral experiments. In an attempt to change this situation, a classical 1930s cooperation paradigm commonly tested on monkeys and apes was modified by using a procedure originally designed for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to measure the reactions of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). This paradigm explores the cognition underlying coordination toward a shared goal. What do animals know or learn about the benefits of cooperation? Can they learn critical elements of a partner's role in cooperation? Whereas observations in nature suggest such understanding in nonhuman primates, experimental results have been mixed, and little evidence exists with regards to nonprimates. Here, we show that elephants can learn to coordinate with a partner in a task requiring two individuals to simultaneously pull two ends of the same rope to obtain a reward. Not only did the elephants act together, they inhibited the pulling response for up to 45 s if the arrival of a partner was delayed. They also grasped that there was no point to pulling if the partner lacked access to the rope. Such results have been interpreted as demonstrating an understanding of cooperation. Through convergent evolution, elephants may have reached a cooperative skill level on a par with that of chimpanzees.
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Men among men don't take norm enforcement seriously
Anne Boschini, Astri Muren & Mats Persson
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
While there is ample evidence of a society-wide cooperation norm, it is not as clear who upholds this norm. In the present paper, we investigate whether there are gender differences with respect to norm enforcement. We let 1403 subjects play games of punishment and reward, individually or in groups with varying gender composition. Broadly, the results indicate that there are no clear gender differences: men are about as inclined as women to punish norm-breakers. However, behavior is context-dependent: men acting among other men are less inclined to uphold a cooperation norm than are women, or men in gender-mixed groups.
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Etiquette and Effort: Holding Doors for Others
Joseph Santamaria & David Rosenbaum
Psychological Science, May 2011, Pages 584-588
Abstract:
Etiquette, the customary code of polite behavior among members of a group, provides a means of conveying respect for others, but what is the basis for etiquette's unwritten rules? Here we show that one form of etiquette, holding a door open for another person, reflects the door holder's expectation that the person for whom he or she holds the door shares the belief that the total effort expended by the two of them will be less than the summed efforts of the two individuals acting on their own. Our observations extend recent work on effort reduction in motor control to the management of social interactions.
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Apparent health encourages reciprocity
Daniel Brian Krupp, Lisa DeBruine & Benedict Jones
Evolution and Human Behavior, May 2011, Pages 198-203
Abstract:
Reciprocity evolves only when social partners reliably repay, with interest, the investments of others. However, not all individuals are equally able - or motivated - to recompense others satisfactorily. As such, reciprocity relies greatly on the capacities and motives of partners. Apparent health may provide a cue to the value of potential exchange partners in this regard: healthier individuals will tend to live longer and accrue more, higher quality resources, thus increasing the incentives for mutual cooperation. In a monetary exchange task, we show that the apparent health of partners' faces affects human reciprocity. Specifically, participants were more willing to return a profitable amount to, but not more willing to invest in, apparently healthy than unhealthy partners. This effect appears to be a function of the attractiveness of apparent health, suggesting a preference for repayment of attractive partners. Furthermore, the effect of apparent health on reciprocal exchange is qualified by the sex of the partners, implicating a history of sexual selection in the evolution of human social exchange.
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Trustworthiness is a social norm, but trusting is not
Cristina Bicchieri, Erte Xiao & Ryan Muldoon
Politics, Philosophy & Economics, May 2011, Pages 170-187
Abstract:
Previous literature has demonstrated the important role that trust plays in developing and maintaining well-functioning societies. However, if we are to learn how to increase levels of trust in society, we must first understand why people choose to trust others. One potential answer to this is that people view trust as normative: there is a social norm for trusting that imposes punishment for noncompliance. To test this, we report data from a survey with salient rewards to elicit people's attitudes regarding the punishment of distrusting behavior in a trust game. Our results show that people do not behave as though trust is a norm. Our participants expected that most people would not punish untrusting investors, regardless of whether the potential trustee was a stranger or a friend. In contrast, our participants behaved as though being trustworthy is a norm. Most participants believed that most people would punish someone who failed to reciprocate a stranger's or a friend's trust. We conclude that, while we were able to reproduce previous results establishing that there is a norm of reciprocity, we found no evidence for a corresponding norm of trust, even among friends.
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Can group discussion promote cooperative ultimatum bargaining?
Dong-Won Choi & Ekta Menghrajani
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, May 2011, Pages 381-398
Abstract:
The influence of discussion-induced shared cognition on bargaining behavior was examined. Three studies tested the hypothesis that shared cognition regarding the best method for reaching a bargaining agreement would decrease the frequency of selfish offers. Consistent with this prediction, participants who engaged in such a group discussion made less selfish offers than those who did not discuss (all studies) or those who engaged in a group discussion regarding commonalities that they shared (Study 2). Study 3 showed that the discussion effect was mediated by shared cognition developed through the discussion. Thus, discussion regarding how best to reach bargaining settlements may develop shared cognition that assists in cooperative bargaining. Implications and limitations of the studies are discussed.
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Paradox lost: Explaining and modeling seemingly random individual behavior in social dilemmas
Joe Oppenheimer, Stephen Wendel & Norman Frohlich
Journal of Theoretical Politics, April 2011, Pages 165-187
Abstract:
Despite a large body of experimental data demonstrating consistent group outcomes in social dilemmas, a close look at individual behavior at the micro level reveals a more complicated story. From round to round, individual behavior appears to be almost random. Using a combination of formal deduction and agent-based simulations, we argue that any theory of individual choice that accounts for the observed behavior of real people is likely to require 1) premises of probabilistic choice, 2) preferences that are a function of others' previous behavior (i.e., context dependent), and 3) preferences that are other-regarding rather than simply self-interested. We present a model that fits the requirements.
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Temporal Dynamics of Cooperation
Matthew Locey & Howard Rachlin
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parties in real-world conflicts often attempt to punish each other's behavior. If this strategy fails to produce mutual cooperation, they may increase punishment magnitude. The present experiment investigated whether delay reduction - potentially less harmful than magnitude increase - would generate mutual cooperation as interactions are repeated. The participants played a prisoner's dilemma game against a computer that played a tit-for-tat strategy, cooperating after a participant cooperated, defecting after a participant defected. For half the participants, the delay between their choice and the computer's next choice was long relative to the delay between the computer's choice and their next choice. For the other half, long and short delays were reversed. The tit-for-tat contingency reinforces the other player's cooperation (by cooperating) and punishes the other player's defection (by defecting). Both the rewards and the punishments are discounted by delay. Consistent with delay discounting, the participants cooperated more when the delay between their choice and the computer's cooperation (reward) or defection (punishment) was relatively short. These results suggest that, in real-world tit-for-tat conflicts, the decreasing delay of reciprocation or retaliation may foster mutual cooperation as effectively as (or more effectively than) the more usual tactic of increasing magnitude of reciprocation or retaliation.
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Bilateral amygdala damage impairs the acquisition and use of common ground in social interaction
Rupa Gupta, Melissa Duff & Daniel Tranel
Neuropsychology, March 2011, Pages 137-146
Objective: The development of "common ground," or mutual knowledge of shared information, is believed to require the ability to update a mental representation of another person's thoughts and knowledge based on verbal information and nonverbal social and emotional signals, to facilitate economical communication. As in other forms of everyday social communication, the development of common ground likely requires the orchestration of multiple cognitive processes supported by various neural systems. Here, we investigate the contribution of the amygdala to these processes.
Method: SM, a patient with complete, focal, bilateral amygdala damage, and deficits in social and emotional processing, and five healthy comparison participants, each interacted with a familiar partner. We investigated the participants' ability to develop and use referential labels across 24 dynamic, collaborative interactions. Participants verbally directed their partner how to arrange a set of 12 abstract tangrams while separated by a low barrier, allowing them to see each other but hiding their tangrams.
Results: In contrast to comparison participants, SM exhibited an impaired rate of learning across trials and did not show the typical simplification in the labels generated during the interactions. Detailed analyses of SM's interactional discourse and social behavior suggested that she has impaired perspective-taking or what can be interpreted as deficient "theory of mind,"
manifested in abnormal "language-in-use."
Conclusions: These results support the conclusion that the amygdala, a structure critical for social and emotional processing, plays an important role in the acquisition and use of common ground and in social communication more broadly.
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Incipient Cognition Solves the Spatial Reciprocity Conundrum of Cooperation
Jeromos Vukov, Francisco Santos & Jorge Pacheco
PLoS ONE, March 2011, e17939
Background: From the simplest living organisms to human societies, cooperation among individuals emerges as a paradox difficult to explain and describe mathematically, although very often observed in reality. Evolutionary game theory offers an excellent toolbar to investigate this issue. Spatial structure has been one of the first mechanisms promoting cooperation; however, alone it only opens a narrow window of viability.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we equip individuals with incipient cognitive abilities, and investigate the evolution of cooperation in a spatial world where retaliation, forgiveness, treason and mutualism may coexist, as individuals engage in Prisoner's Dilemma games. In the model, individuals are able to distinguish their partners and act towards them based on previous interactions. We show how the simplest level of cognition, alone, can lead to the emergence of cooperation.
Conclusions/Significance: Despite the incipient nature of the individuals' cognitive abilities, cooperation emerges for unprecedented values of the temptation to cheat, being also robust to invasion by cheaters, errors in decision making and inaccuracy of imitation, features akin to many species, including humans.
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Let the force be with us: Dyads exploit haptic coupling for coordination
Robrecht van der Wel, Guenther Knoblich & Natalie Sebanz
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often perform actions that involve a direct physical coupling with another person, such as when moving furniture together. Here, we examined how people successfully coordinate such actions with others. We tested the hypothesis that dyads amplify their forces to create haptic information to coordinate. Participants moved a pole (resembling a pendulum) back and forth between two targets at different amplitudes and frequencies. They did so by pulling on cords attached to the base of the pole, one on each side. In the individual condition, one participant performed this task bimanually, and in the joint condition two participants each controlled one cord. We measured the moment-to-moment pulling forces on each cord and the pole kinematics to determine how well individuals and dyads performed. Results indicated that dyads produced much more overlapping forces than individuals, especially for tasks with higher coordination requirements. Thus, the results suggest that dyads amplify their forces to generate a haptic information channel. This likely reflects a general coordination principle in haptic joint action, where force amplification allows dyads to perform at the same level as individuals.
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The give-or-take-some dilemma: An empirical investigation of a hybrid social dilemma
Matthew McCarter, David Budescu & Jürgen Scheffran
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
We describe and empirically investigate a hybrid social dilemma that merges give-some and take-some dilemmas by allowing individuals to choose to either give or to take resources from a shared resource pool. Study 1 finds that (a) group size increases the inequality among group members and the likelihood of creating the public good, while reducing the amount of wasted resources; (b) larger bonuses increase provision rates; and (c) asymmetry in the wealth distribution of the group members induces higher levels of inequality of the final outcomes. Following the logic of appropriateness, players with high (low) endowments were more likely to give toward (take from) the shared resource. Study 2 finds that the tendency of the players with high (low) endowments to give (take) is amplified as the difference between endowment levels increased, and the players' behavior is correlated with, and predictable from, independent judgments of what is perceived as appropriate.
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Jason Aimone & Daniel Houser
PLoS ONE, March 2011, e17725
Abstract:
Many studies demonstrate the social benefits of cooperation. Likewise, recent studies convincingly demonstrate that betrayal aversion hinders trust and discourages cooperation. In this respect, betrayal aversion is unlike socially "beneficial" preferences including altruism, fairness and inequity aversion, all of which encourage cooperation and exchange. To our knowledge, other than the suggestion that it acts as a barrier to rash trust decisions, the benefits of betrayal aversion remain largely unexplored. Here we use laboratory experiments with human participants to show that groups including betrayal-averse agents achieve higher levels of reciprocity and more profitable social exchange than groups lacking betrayal aversion. These results are the first rigorous evidence on the benefits of betrayal aversion, and may help future research investigating cultural differences in betrayal aversion as well as future research on the evolutionary roots of betrayal aversion. Further, our results extend the understanding of how intentions affect social interactions and exchange and provide an effective platform for further research on betrayal aversion and its effects on human behavior.
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Larger reward values alone are not enough to entice more cooperation
Fabio Leite
Thinking & Reasoning, February 2011, Pages 82-103
Abstract:
Two experiments using an iterated prisoner's dilemma game examined under which conditions participants' cooperation rates would either change due to monetary value changes (e.g., 3 cents to 3 dollars) or not change due to numeric value changes (e.g., 3 dollars to 300 cents). A total of 102 university students played the game against a computer that employed one of four strategies across blocks. Results showed high rates of cooperation when participants played against a tit-for-tat strategy and low rates of cooperation against a random strategy. There was no change in cooperation rates due to changes in numeric value alone and a decrease in cooperation rates when large monetary values were at stake. Cooperation rates were higher and cooperation responses slower at earlier stages of the game. I argue that people's ability to strategize plays a key role in the changing rates and speed of cooperative behaviour in the prisoner's dilemma.
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The Effect of Repeated Play on Reputation Building: An Experimental Approach
Dustin Tingley & Barbara Walter
International Organization, April 2011, Pages 343-365
Abstract:
What effect does repeated play have on reputation building? The literature on international relations remains divided on whether, when, and how reputation matters in both interstate and intrastate conflict. We examine reputation building through a series of incentivized laboratory experiments. Using comparative statics from a repeated entry-deterrence game, we isolate how incentives for reputation building should change as the number of entrants changes. We find that subjects in our experiments generally build reputations and that those investments pay off, but we also find that some subjects did not react to incentives to build reputation in ways our model had predicted. In order to explain this, we focus on the heterogeneity of preferences and cognitive abilities that may exist in any population. Our research suggests that rational-choice scholars of international relations and those using more psychologically based explanations have more common ground than previously articulated.
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Manuel Varlet et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, April 2011, Pages 473-483
Abstract:
The goal of the current study was to investigate whether a visual coupling between two people can produce spontaneous interpersonal postural coordination and change their intrapersonal postural coordination involved in the control of stance. We examined the front-to-back head displacements of participants and the angular motion of their hip and ankle during a visual tracking task performed alone and paired. Our results showed that visually paired participants exhibited spontaneous coordination between the movements of their head, hip, and ankle. Moreover, the visual coupling modified the spontaneous intrapersonal ankle-hip coordination dynamics of participants and their performance during visual tracking. Generally, our findings demonstrated reciprocal relations between intrapersonal and interpersonal coordination during social interaction.
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Common fate, game harmony and contributions to public goods: Experimental evidence
Luca Corazzini & Robert Sugden
International Review of Economics, March 2011, Pages 43-52
Abstract:
We experimentally study the effects of common fate on voluntary contributions to linear public goods. In each period, earnings are assigned to subjects according to the outcome of a lottery. In ‘common fate', ‘independent fate' and ‘rival fate' treatments, the lottery outcomes of group members are (respectively) positively correlated, stochastically independent and negatively correlated. We observe the highest contributions and strongest reciprocity under common fate. Contrary to the game harmony hypothesis, contributions are not lower under rival fate than under independent fate. Surprisingly, under rival fate, having won the lottery in one period induces higher contributions in the next period.