Emergent Prosocial Behavior During Dynamic Human Group Formation

Abstract

For scientists, policy makers, and the general population, there is increasing interest in how humans form cooperative groups. However, how group-oriented behavior emerges during the dynamic process of group formation is still unknown. We hypothesize that humans will exhibit emergent prosocial behavior as their immediate group size increases. Using a network-embedded-dyad prisoner dilemma task, with periodic opportunities to retain or remove group members, we find subjects consistently follow a well-performing reciprocal base policy (tit-for-tat-like) across the experimental session. However, subjects’ strategies also became more forgiving and less exploitative as group size increased, with a default preference shift to cooperation. Thus, human cooperation may emerge from a desire to create and maintain larger and more cooperative groups, and multiscale strategy that considers both self-interest and group-interest.

Perceptions of social rigidity predict loneliness across the Japanese population

“…One individual-level explanation is that perceptions of low relational mobility may lead people to believe that most of the others in their environment prefer more rigid and formal social interactions even if this is not actually the case 39 , hindering development of more intimate and meaningful social connections 1 , 20 , 26 , 38 . Alternatively (or in parallel), having more personal choice in forming relationships (higher relational mobility) may make people value and invest more in their chosen social connections, compared to the situation where social connections are just passively assigned in rigid social environments (lower relational mobility) 32 , 33 , 36 , 40 , 41 . However, relational mobility has been historically predominantly reported as a static value per culture or nation, leading relational mobility researchers to write calls encouraging a better understanding of how within-country differences in perceptions of relational mobility relate to individual-level outcomes in a given country, yet little progress has been made in this direction 31 , 42 .…”