The evolution of judgement bias in indirect reciprocity

Rankin, Daniel J.; Eggimann, Franziska

doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.1715

Cited by 16 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Thus, error-management might still play a role in sustaining cooperation but because individuals can never be certain that their actions are unobserved, rather than because they misperceive interaction duration. If there is even a slight possibility that actions will be observed—and if being seen as unhelpful carries greater costs than helping when no one is watching (as has been proposed in models of judgment bias, Rankin and Eggimann, 2009 )—then selection might favor psychological mechanisms that make us behave as though we are observed most of the time. Empirical evidence suggests that reputation concerns have an important influence on prosocial tendency: people are typically more cooperative in public rather than anonymous laboratory games (e.g., Andreoni and Petrie, 2004 ; Lamba and Mace, 2010 ) and even exposing people to subtle cues of being watched (in the form of eye images) increases prosocial behavior under some circumstances (e.g., Haley and Fessler, 2005 ; Bateson et al, 2006 ; but see Fehr and Schneider, 2010 ; Raihani and Bshary, 2012 for failed replications).…”

Section: Direct Benefits Without Between-group Competitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why humans might help strangers

Raihani

Bshary

2015

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Humans regularly help strangers, even when interactions are apparently unobserved and unlikely to be repeated. Such situations have been simulated in the laboratory using anonymous one-shot games (e.g., prisoner’s dilemma) where the payoff matrices used make helping biologically altruistic. As in real-life, participants often cooperate in the lab in these one-shot games with non-relatives, despite that fact that helping is under negative selection under these circumstances. Two broad explanations for such behavior prevail. The “big mistake” or “mismatch” theorists argue that behavior is constrained by psychological mechanisms that evolved predominantly in the context of repeated interactions with known individuals. In contrast, the cultural group selection theorists posit that humans have been selected to cooperate in anonymous one-shot interactions due to strong between-group competition, which creates interdependence among in-group members. We present these two hypotheses before discussing alternative routes by which humans could increase their direct fitness by cooperating with strangers under natural conditions. In doing so, we explain why the standard lab games do not capture real-life in various important aspects. First, asymmetries in the cost of perceptual errors regarding the context of the interaction (one-shot vs. repeated; anonymous vs. public) might have selected for strategies that minimize the chance of making costly behavioral errors. Second, helping strangers might be a successful strategy for identifying other cooperative individuals in the population, where partner choice can turn strangers into interaction partners. Third, in contrast to the assumptions of the prisoner’s dilemma model, it is possible that benefits of cooperation follow a non-linear function of investment. Non-linear benefits result in negative frequency dependence even in one-shot games. Finally, in many real-world situations individuals are able to parcel investments such that a one-shot interaction is turned into a repeated game of many decisions.

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Section: Direct Benefits Without Between-group Competitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why humans might help strangers

Raihani

Bshary

2015

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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“…Such punitive actions influence an individual's 'punishment score', which reflects how much an individual punished previously and can then be used by others to discriminate between punishers and non-punishers. Such a reputation system is analogous to the image scoring proposed for the evolution of indirect reciprocity [14][15][16]18,21,32,33]. In a simple analytical model, we investigate the evolutionary stability of a strategy that discriminates between punishers and non-punishers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of punishment through reputation

2010

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Punishment of non-cooperators has been observed to promote cooperation. Such punishment is an evolutionary puzzle because it is costly to the punisher while beneficial to others, for example, through increased social cohesion. Recent studies have concluded that punishing strategies usually pay less than some non-punishing strategies. These findings suggest that punishment could not have directly evolved to promote cooperation. However, while it is well established that reputation plays a key role in human cooperation, the simple threat from a reputation of being a punisher may not have been sufficiently explored yet in order to explain the evolution of costly punishment. Here, we first show analytically that punishment can lead to long-term benefits if it influences one's reputation and thereby makes the punisher more likely to receive help in future interactions. Then, in computer simulations, we incorporate up to 40 more complex strategies that use different kinds of reputations (e.g. from generous actions), or strategies that not only include punitive behaviours directed towards defectors but also towards cooperators for example. Our findings demonstrate that punishment can directly evolve through a simple reputation system. We conclude that reputation is crucial for the evolution of punishment by making a punisher more likely to receive help in future interactions, and that experiments investigating the beneficial effects of punishment in humans should include reputation as an explicit feature.

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“…It is worth noting that recent simulations by Rankin and Eggimann (2009) suggest that within the framework provided by the standing model, there is a much larger range of benefits over which judgement bias towards bad acts is favoured.…”

Section: Discussion and Concluding Remarksmentioning

confidence: 98%

Good standing and cooperation

Beraldo

2011

Int Rev Econ

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Indirect reciprocity is generally considered one of the leading mechanisms\ud to explain how cooperation may emerge by natural selection. The basic\ud intuition is that establishing a reputation of being a helpful individual increases the\ud probability of being in turn helped. Two models have been proposed to describe\ud how indirect reciprocity may work: the standing model (Sugden 1986/2004 in The\ud economics of rights, cooperation and welfare. Blackwell, Oxford.) and the imagescoring\ud model (Nowak and Sigmund 1998a in Nature 393:573–577, b in J Theoretical\ud Biol 194:561–574). Although there is evidence that the former model would\ud perform better under a wide set of circumstances, it is often maintained that it\ud requires individuals with an implausibly large capacity of processing recursive\ud information. In this paper, I argue that this is not actually the case. I further\ud emphasize that even if the hypothesis of indirect reciprocity is unable to give a fair\ud account of the ecological bases of cooperation, it has inspired a deal of research\ud precious to social sciences

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The evolution of judgement bias in indirect reciprocity

Cited by 16 publications

References 35 publications

Why humans might help strangers

Why humans might help strangers

The evolution of punishment through reputation

Good standing and cooperation

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