Effects of parity, sympathy and reciprocity in increasing social welfare

Abstract

We are interested in understanding how socially desirable traits like sympathy, reciprocity, and fairness can survive in environments that include aggressive and exploitative agents. Social scientists have long theorized about ingrained motivational factors as explanations for departures from self-seeking behaviors by human subjects. Some of these factors, namely reciprocity, have also been studied extensively in the context of agent systems as tools for promoting cooperation and improving social welfare in stable societies. In this paper, we evaluate how other factors like sympathy and parity can be used by agents to seek out cooperation possibilities while avoiding exploitation traps in more dynamic societies. We evaluate the relative effectiveness of agents influenced by different social considerations when they can change who they interact with in their environment using both an experimental framework and a predictive analysis. Such rewiring of social networks not only allows possibly vulnerable agents to avoid exploitation but also allows them to form gainful coalitions to leverage mutually beneficial cooperation, thereby significantly increasing social welfare.

Special issue on adaptive and learning agents 2018

“…In the paper, Effects of parity, sympathy and reciprocity in increasing social welfare, Sen et al (2020) aim to develop an understanding of how socially desirable traits like sympathy, reciprocity and fairness can survive in environments that include aggressive and exploitative agents. The authors investigate how parity, sympathy and reciprocity can be used by agents to seek out cooperation possibilities while avoiding exploitation traps in dynamic societies.…”

Understanding the cognitive and neuroimaging bases underlying the detrimental impact of sleep deprivation on reciprocity

“… 17 , 18 , 19 Reciprocity has been used in social psychology to explain a wide range of phenomena, such as altruism, 20 interpersonal helping 21 and gift giving, 22 and has received extensive attention from psychology, sociology, economics and neuroscience. 23 , 24 , 25 Yet, to date, only a few studies have investigated the influence of TSD on reciprocity. Two previous studies 14 , 26 have explored this question using the trust game, in which participants received the investment of an investor and decided how much to reciprocate.…”