Coevolution of actions, personal norms and beliefs about others in social dilemmas

Gavrilets, Sergey

doi:10.1017/ehs.2021.40

Cited by 21 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 129 publications

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“…Social norms and institutions are a ubiquitous component of our social life and decision-making [66,138,139]. While there is a growing number of theoretical studies in economics and cultural evolution that account for psychological or sociological factors [96,98,140,141], these efforts have not led so far to falsifiable predictions in studies of social conflict that distinguish between material and non-material forces [41]. Our model offers such predictions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Following earlier work (e.g. [94][95][96][97][98]), we define the utility function as the sum of a material and normative components. For a non-dominant faction,…”

Section: Utility Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These are the main forces driving human behaviour as studied by the two most commonly used mathematical theories in social sciences: game theory [93,[99][100][101] and social influence theory [102][103][104][105][106][107]. Our approach unifies them in a single framework leading to more realistic and comprehensive models [76,[96][97][98][108][109][110]. We separate social influences into peer influences and the authority/state influence because these two types of influence have different nature and power [75,97,98,[111][112][113][114][115].…”

Section: Utility Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our approach unifies them in a single framework leading to more realistic and comprehensive models [76,[96][97][98][108][109][110]. We separate social influences into peer influences and the authority/state influence because these two types of influence have different nature and power [75,97,98,[111][112][113][114][115].…”

Section: Utility Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inequality between identity groups and social unrest

Houle

Ruck

Bentley

et al. 2022

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Economic, social and political inequality between different identity groups is an important contributor to violent conflicts within societies. To deepen our understanding of the underlying social dynamics, we develop a mathematical model describing cooperation and conflict in a society composed of multiple factions engaged in economic and political interactions. Our model predicts that growing economic and political inequality tends to lead to the collapse of cooperation between factions that were initially seeking to cooperate. Certain mechanisms can delay this process, including the decoupling of political and economic power through rule of law and allegiance to the state or dominant faction. Counterintuitively, anti-conformity (a social norm for independent action) can also stabilize society, by preventing initial defections from cooperation from cascading through society. However, the availability of certain material resources that can be acquired by the state without cooperation with other factions has the opposite effect. We test several of these predictions using a multivariate statistical analysis of data covering 75 countries worldwide. Using social unrest as a proxy for the breakdown of cooperation in society, we find support for many of the predictions from our theory.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Following earlier work (e.g. [94][95][96][97][98]), we define the utility function as the sum of a material and normative components. For a non-dominant faction,…”

Section: Utility Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Utility Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Utility Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Inequality between identity groups and social unrest

Houle

Ruck

Bentley

et al. 2022

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…Our goal will be to explore the effects of individual variation, culture, psychology and interventions on the success or failure of innovations. We will use recent advances in modelling the dynamics of actions, attitudes and beliefs of heterogeneous individuals in social dilemmas [48,[76][77][78]. Specifically, we will build and study a model describing the joint dynamics of three important processes: individual learning and mastering a new technology, the evolution of individual attitudes towards the new technology and the evolution of individual adoption decisions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The spread of technological innovations: effects of psychology, culture and policy interventions

2022

Self Cite

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Technological innovations drive the evolution of human societies. The success of innovations depends not only on their actual benefits but also on how potential adopters perceive them and how their beliefs are affected by their social and cultural environment. To deepen our understanding of socio-psychological processes affecting the new technology spread, we model the joint dynamics of three interlinked processes: individual learning and mastering the new technology, changes in individual attitudes towards it, and changes in individual adoption decisions. We assume that the new technology can potentially lead to a higher benefit but achieving it requires learning. We posit that individual decision-making process as well as their attitudes are affected by cognitive dissonance and conformity with peers and an external authority. Individuals vary in different psychological characteristics and in their attitudes. We investigate both transient dynamics and long-term equilibria observed in our model. We show that early adopters are usually individuals who are characterized by low cognitive dissonance and low conformity with peers but are sensitive to the effort of an external authority promoting the innovation. We examine the effectiveness of five different intervention strategies aiming to promote the diffusion of a new technology: training individuals, providing subsidies for early adopters, increasing the visibility of peer actions, simplifying the exchange of opinions between people, and increasing the effort of an external authority. We also discuss the effects of culture on the spread of innovations. Finally, we demonstrate that neglecting the cognitive forces and the dynamic nature of individual attitudes can lead to wrong conclusions about adoption of innovations. Our results can be useful in developing more efficient policies aiming to promote the spread of new technologies in different societies, cultures and countries.

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Evolution of cooperation in the indefinitely repeated collective action with a contest for power

Rosokha,

Lyu,

Tverskoi

et al. 2024

Econ Theory

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Social and political inequality among individuals is a common driving force behind the breakdown in cooperation. In this paper, we theoretically and experimentally study cooperation among individuals facing a sequence of collective-action problems in which the benefits of cooperation are divided according to political power that is obtained through a contest. We have three main results. First, we find that cooperation predictably responds to the fundamental parameters of the collective-action problem. Specifically, it is increasing in the benefit to cooperation and how much benefit is gained from partial group cooperation, and decreasing in the number of players. Second, we find that when players are unrestricted in their expenditures in the contest, cooperation is much lower than when expenditures are set to a specific proportion of earnings. Finally, we find that individual norms and beliefs account for a substantial proportion of explained variance in individuals’ decisions to cooperate.

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Coevolution of actions, personal norms and beliefs about others in social dilemmas

Cited by 21 publications

References 129 publications

Inequality between identity groups and social unrest

Inequality between identity groups and social unrest

The spread of technological innovations: effects of psychology, culture and policy interventions

Evolution of cooperation in the indefinitely repeated collective action with a contest for power

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