Assortment, but not knowledge of assortment, affects cooperation and individual success in human groups

Abstract

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.

Group formation and cooperation in social dilemmas: A survey and meta-analytic evidence

“…in public goods games and common pool resource games. Finally,Junikka et al [2017] andNagatsu et al [2018] find contradictory results about the effect of assortment information on cooperation within the cooperative and non-cooperative individuals, whileChaudhuri et al [2016] find that conditional cooperators increase their contributions when informed about the presence of other conditional cooperators in the group.…”

Making good cider out of bad apples — Signaling expectations boosts cooperation among would-be free riders

“…1This is also the cases with a more recent study byJunikka et al (2017).https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500008883 Published online by Cambridge University Press…”