False beliefs can bootstrap cooperative communities through social norms

Abstract

Building cooperative communities has always been a crucial problem for human societies. Much research suggests that cooperation is facilitated by knowing who exactly is a cooperator and defector, and being able to respond accordingly. As such, anonymous games is thought to hinder cooperation. Here, we show that this conclusion is altered dramatically in the presence of conditional cooperation norms and heterogeneous beliefs about others' behaviours. Specifically, we show that inaccurate beliefs about other players' behaviours can in fact help foster and stabilize cooperation via social norms. To show this, we combine the population dynamics of a social community with the game theory of interactions within the community. In our model, individuals can join a community based on beliefs generated by public signals regarding the level of cooperation within, and decide to cooperate or not depending on these beliefs. These signals may overstate how much cooperation there really is. We show that even if individuals eventually learn the true level of cooperation, the initially false beliefs can trigger a dynamic that sustains high level of cooperation within the community. We also characterize how the rates of joining, leaving, and learning in the community affect the cooperation level and community size simultaneously. Our results illustrate how false beliefs in the presence of conditional cooperation norms can help build up cooperative communities.

The impact of threshold decision mechanisms of collective behaviour on disease spread

“…As the number of infectious individuals increases, the best response function shifts, which can shift equilibrium behaviour from a state where only a few individuals adopt the NPI to a bistable system where most people will either adopt the NPI or not, depending on what they believe others do, and then to a state where almost all engage in the behaviour. Such phenomena have been previously explored in the formation and dynamics of social groups (Morsky and Akçay, 2021). Figures 1b and 1c depict such shifts.…”

“…Though we explored the case with small positive or negative biases in these beliefs and found no large impact on the qualitative results (Appendix C), further exploration of the role of inaccurate beliefs in this model could be useful. In a previous compartmental model of norm adoption, it was found that such inaccurate beliefs about population behavior could substantially impact the emergence of a social norm (Morsky and Akçay, 2021). In the context of NPIs, biases in beliefs about population behavior can arise through visibility or salience bias (Han et al, 2019): for instance, people going out dining are more visible than people staying in, which can induce lower perception of NPI behaviors, and delay the onset of NPI adoption.…”

“…Further, adherence to norms of mask wearing can vary within a population due to group identity, which can frustrate behavioural interventions (Cakanlar et al, 2022; Dimant et al, 2022; Gelfand et al, 2022). Though norms can lead to coordination of human behaviour (Gintis, 2010; Morsky and Akçay, 2019) and the emergence of cooperative communities (Ostrom, 2000; Morsky and Akçay, 2021) thereby overcoming social dilemmas, they also can lead to harmful outcomes and be difficult to dislodge (Efferson et al, 2020). It is important to incorporate these social phenomena into epidemiological theory and the design of public health control efforts.…”