Variation in Cooperative Behaviour within a Single City

Abstract

Human cooperative behaviour, as assayed by decisions in experimental economic dilemmas such as the Dictator Game, is variable across human populations. Within-population variation has been less well studied, especially within industrial societies. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which community-level variation in Dictator Game behaviour relates to community-level variation in real-world social behaviour. We chose two neighbourhoods of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne that were similar in most regards, but at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of level of socioeconomic deprivation. We administered Dictator Games to randomly-selected residents, and also gathered a large number of more naturalistic measures of cooperativeness. There were dramatic differences in Dictator Game behaviour between the two neighbourhoods, with the mean allocation to the other player close to half the stake in the affluent neighbourhood, and close to one tenth of the stake in the deprived neighbourhood. Moreover, the deprived neighbourhood was also characterised by lower self-reported social capital, higher frequencies of crime and antisocial behaviour, a higher frequency of littering, and less willingness to take part in a survey or return a lost letter. On the other hand, there were no differences between the neighbourhoods in terms of the probability of helping a person who dropped an object, needed directions to a hospital, or needed to make change for a coin, and people on the streets were less likely to be alone in the deprived neighbourhood than the affluent one. We conclude that there can be dramatic local differences in cooperative behaviour within the same city, and that these need further theoretical explanation.

Harsh childhood environmental characteristics predict exploitation and retaliation in humans

“…within the same city cooperate [9] and retaliate [42] at different rates; the same is true for people from different villages within the same broad cultural group [8]. These within-population individual differences are, in principle, amenable to individual-level explanations, as the architects of the cultural group selection approaches to cooperation readily concede [5,43].…”

“…Norms for cooperating, and for punishing defectors, it is argued, proliferate because they suit people for life in large societies in which social and economic life increasingly incorporates non-kin and interactions that cannot be stabilized through direct reciprocity [7]. The sufficiency of this theoretical approach, however, is called into question by recent evidence that the variation among populations within a single culture [8], and even neighbourhoods within the same city [9], is as substantial as is the variance between cultures-not to mention the substantial individual differences among individuals from the same subject pools [10]. Thus, other theories for these individual differences merit consideration.…”

“…(a) Adaptationism, life history and childhood social ecology An adaptationist approach to these individual differences arises from the premise that natural selection produces organisms whose behaviours are not necessarily constrained to single, inflexible strategies: instead, organisms ( can often choose (not necessarily consciously) from a suite of strategies in response to environmental cues that contain information about which strategies will fit best with local conditions, based on ancestral correlations between those cues and the behaviours that raised fitness when those behaviours were enacted in response to those cues [9,11]. To wit, girls with stressful family relationships reach reproductive maturity faster than those with more positive family relationships [12], age at first conception is lower and rates of violence are higher in neighbourhoods with low life expectancies [13], and people from homes in which nurturance, discipline and parental care were inconsistent, or from neighbourhoods in which violence and economic disadvantage were high, engage in more impulsive and risky behaviour as young adults [14,15].…”

The nature and dynamics of world religions: a life-history approach

“…For instance, Nettle et al [39] compared cooperative behaviours in two neighbourhoods in the same British city (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) that differed in socio-economic status (SES). Using a dictator game, Nettle et al found that participants living in the harsher neighbourhood gave significantly less than participants living in the more affluent neighbourhood.…”

Residential Surrounding Greenness, Self-Rated Health and Interrelations with Aspects of Neighborhood Environment and Social Relations

“…One possible explanation for this finding is that participants with lower greenness may be likelier to live in deprived neighborhoods. Previous studies [47,48] have found that living in deprived neighborhoods was associated with lower social capital (in terms of trusting neighbors, helping each other out, etc. ), which may add to the observed result in our study.…”