Culture and cooperation

Gächter, Simon; Herrmann, Benedikt; Thöni, Christian

doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0135

Cited by 252 publications

(191 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…Cooperative outcomes are fortuitous, but not inevitable. As discussed elsewhere in this volume (see Gächter et al 2010), functional punishment is important in maintaining cooperation in humans, perhaps in a way not seen in other animals (Fehr & Fischbacher 2004a). One basic reason for this is that humans will punish others for social violations even when they personally stand nothing to gain.…”

Section: Gros-louis 2004)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As will be discussed here and elsewhere in this volume (Brosnan et al 2010b;Gächter et al 2010;Melis & Semmann 2010), harm, and the threat of it, can be powerful inducements for cooperation. Functionally, punishment-also referred to as negative reciprocity, coercion, harassment and return-benefits spite-is likely to be important for maintaining cooperation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Punishment and spite, the dark side of cooperation

Jensen

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

173

167

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Causing harm to others would hardly seem to be relevant to cooperation, other than as a barrier to it. However, because selfish individuals will exploit cooperators, functional punishment is an effective mechanism for enforcing cooperation by deterring free-riding. Although functional punishment can shape the social behaviour of others by targeting non-cooperative behaviour, it can also intimidate others into doing almost anything. Second-party functional punishment is a self-serving behaviour at the disposal of dominant individuals who can coerce others into behaving cooperatively, but it need not do so. Third-party and altruistic functional punishment are less likely to be selfishly motivated and would seem more likely to maintain norms of cooperation in large groups. These forms of functional punishment may be an essential part of non-kin cooperation on a scale exhibited only by humans. While punitive sentiments might be the psychological force behind punitive behaviours, spiteful motives might also play an important role. Furthermore, functionally spiteful acts might not be maladaptive; reckoning gains relative to others rather than in absolute terms can lead to hyper-competitiveness, which might also be an important part of human cooperation, rather than just an ugly by-product.

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Section: Gros-louis 2004)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punishment and spite, the dark side of cooperation

Jensen

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

173

167

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“…Whereas several studies found that different countries exhibit cooperation rates of varying magnitude (27)(28)(29)(30)(31), specific empirical evidence on cross-societal cooperation with interaction partners from different nations is still scarce and limited to the comparison between few countries involving mainly student populations. However, these studies provide noteworthy first evidence that expectations and the willingness to cooperate vary with the nationality of the interaction partner (32,33).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Multinational investigation of cross-societal cooperation

Dorrough

Glöckner

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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In a globalized world, establishing successful cooperation between people from different nations is becoming increasingly important. We present results from a comprehensive investigation of crosssocietal cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemmas involving population-representative samples from six countries and identify crucial facilitators of and obstacles to cooperation. In interactions involving mutual knowledge about only the other players' nationalities, we demonstrate that people hold strong and transnationally shared expectations (i.e., stereotypes) concerning the cooperation level of interaction partners from other countries. These expectations are the strongest determinants of participant cooperation. Paradoxically, however, they turn out to be incorrect stereotypes that even correlate negatively with reality. In addition to erroneous expectations, participants' cooperation behavior is driven by (shared) social preferences that vary according to the interaction partner's nationality. In the cross-societal context, these social preferences are influenced by differences in wealth and ingroup favoritism, as well as effects of specific country combinations but not by spatial distance between nations.M any social interactions have the structure of a social dilemma, which is characterized by the fact that mutual cooperation-that is, completely transferring one's own resources to an interaction partner (or a group account)-would lead to a socially optimal outcome in that the sum of pay-offs for all persons involved is maximized. However, irrespective of the interaction partner's behavior, each individual person would be better off by defecting: that is, transferring no resources. Thus, mutual defection is the dominant strategy that should be chosen by rational money-maximizing agents (1). Still, cooperation has been observed even in fully anonymous one-shot social dilemmas (2) in which individuals interact only once, so that any selfish incentive to cooperate strategically is excluded. Specifically, it is impossible to cooperate with the aim to later profit from a good reputation (3) or reciprocity (2).Various factors have been identified that, in combination, could explain this puzzling finding. Individuals might have social preferences in that they value the outcome of others and gain utility from the absolute pay-off of other players or lose utility from inequality in pay-offs (4-6). Additionally, individuals might have specific expectations that the other player will cooperate as well (7,8). Social preferences and expectations might thereby be driven partially by similarity and kinship, in that individuals cooperate with genetically similar others to increase biological fitness of their own genotype and expect others to do the same (9, 10).In the present study, our key goal is to investigate the determinants of cooperation between people from different nations. Specifically, cooperation-related expectations and social preferences cannot only account for cooperation behavior in general. These expectations...

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“…Rzeszutek et al [38] examined cross-cultural variation in song characteristics across 16 Formosan-speaking ethnolinguistic groups and found an overall F ST of 0.02, indicating that approximately 2 per cent of variation was between populations. In addition, debates in experimental economics have begun to focus on within-versus between-population variation in strategies employed in economic games [39][40][41].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population structure and cultural geography of a folktale in Europe

2013

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Despite a burgeoning science of cultural evolution, relatively little work has focused on the population structure of human cultural variation. By contrast, studies in human population genetics use a suite of tools to quantify and analyse spatial and temporal patterns of genetic variation within and between populations. Human genetic diversity can be explained largely as a result of migration and drift giving rise to gradual genetic clines, together with some discontinuities arising from geographical and cultural barriers to gene flow. Here, we adapt theory and methods from population genetics to quantify the influence of geography and ethnolinguistic boundaries on the distribution of 700 variants of a folktale in 31 European ethnolinguistic populations. We find that geographical distance and ethnolinguistic affiliation exert significant independent effects on folktale diversity and that variation between populations supports a clustering concordant with European geography. This pattern of geographical clines and clusters parallels the pattern of human genetic diversity in Europe, although the effects of geographical distance and ethnolinguistic boundaries are stronger for folktales than genes. Our findings highlight the importance of geography and population boundaries in models of human cultural variation and point to key similarities and differences between evolutionary processes operating on human genes and culture.

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Culture and cooperation

Cited by 252 publications

References 91 publications

Punishment and spite, the dark side of cooperation

Punishment and spite, the dark side of cooperation

Multinational investigation of cross-societal cooperation

Population structure and cultural geography of a folktale in Europe

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