The problem of sustaining a public resource that everybody is free to overuse-the 'tragedy of the commons'-emerges in many social dilemmas, such as our inability to sustain the global climate. Public goods experiments, which are used to study this type of problem, usually confirm that the collective benefit will not be produced. Because individuals and countries often participate in several social games simultaneously, the interaction of these games may provide a sophisticated way by which to maintain the public resource. Indirect reciprocity, 'give and you shall receive', is built on reputation and can sustain a high level of cooperation, as shown by game theorists. Here we show, through alternating rounds of public goods and indirect reciprocity games, that the need to maintain reputation for indirect reciprocity maintains contributions to the public good at an unexpectedly high level. But if rounds of indirect reciprocation are not expected, then contributions to the public good drop quickly to zero. Alternating the games leads to higher profits for all players. As reputation may be a currency that is valid in many social games, our approach could be used to test social dilemmas for their solubility.

Will a group of people reach a collective target through individual contributions when everyone suffers individually if the target is missed? This ''collective-risk social dilemma'' exists in various social scenarios, the globally most challenging one being the prevention of dangerous climate change. Reaching the collective target requires individual sacrifice, with benefits to all but no guarantee that others will also contribute. It even seems tempting to contribute less and save money to induce others to contribute more, hence the dilemma and the risk of failure. Here, we introduce the collective-risk social dilemma and simulate it in a controlled experiment: Will a group of people reach a fixed target sum through successive monetary contributions, when they know they will lose all their remaining money with a certain probability if they fail to reach the target sum? We find that, under high risk of simulated dangerous climate change, half of the groups succeed in reaching the target sum, whereas the others only marginally fail. When the risk of loss is only as high as the necessary average investment or even lower, the groups generally fail to reach the target sum. We conclude that one possible strategy to relieve the collective-risk dilemma in high-risk situations is to convince people that failure to invest enough is very likely to cause grave financial loss to the individual. Our analysis describes the social window humankind has to prevent dangerous climate change.cooperation ͉ public good ͉ threshold

Evolutionary game dynamics describe not only frequency-dependent genetic evolution, but also cultural evolution in humans. In this context, successful strategies spread by imitation. It has been shown that the details of strategy update rules can have a crucial impact on evolutionary dynamics in theoretical models and, for example, can significantly alter the level of cooperation in social dilemmas. What kind of strategy update rules can describe imitation dynamics in humans? Here, we present a way to measure such strategy update rules in a behavioral experiment. We use a setting in which individuals are virtually arranged on a spatial lattice. This produces a large number of different strategic situations from which we can assess strategy updating. Most importantly, spontaneous strategy changes corresponding to mutations or exploration behavior are more frequent than assumed in many models. Our experimental approach to measure properties of the update mechanisms used in theoretical models will be useful for mathematical models of cultural evolution.update mechanisms | cooperation | finite populations | structured populations C lassical game theory assumes that agents make rational decisions, taking into account that they are interdependent with other agents that are also fully rational (1). Although this assumption has proved to be problematic even in humans, evolutionary game theory has been developed to describe the dynamics of genetic or cultural evolution when fitness is not fixed but depends on the interactions with others. Applications of this framework range from the dynamics of microbes (2-4) to animal behavior (5, 6) and human behavior (7-9). Many aspects of evolutionary dynamics hinge on the microscopic rules describing how successful strategies spread. In particular, in structured populations, these rules can crucially alter the evolutionary outcome and, for example, determine whether cooperation evolves or not (10-12). Thus, it is of great importance to infer how strategies are actually adopted. To this end, we have developed a behavioral experiment that mimics typical properties of theoretical models but replaces the computer agents by real human players. Each player interacts only with his or her immediate neighbors. To evaluate his or her performance, each player can compare his or her payoff with the payoff of the neighbors and use this as a basis to adopt new strategies. However, there are some subtle differences between mathematical models and human behavior: Humans may use mixed strategies (i.e., randomize between their options) or even change their strategies over time, whereas most theoretical models consider the simplest case in which a player's strategy is equated with his action. Thus, any change in behavior is equated to a change in strategy. If we aim to apply this simple framework of one-shot games as a first approximation to describe human behavior, we have to infer the details of strategy adoption (e.g., the rate of spontaneous strategy changes). We use a spatial game in which human...

Communication about social topics is abundant in human societies, and many functions have been attributed to such gossiping. One of these proposed functions is the management of reputations. Reputation by itself has been shown to have a strong influence on cooperation dynamics in games of indirect reciprocity, and this notion helps to explain the observed high level of cooperation in humans. Here we designed a game to test a widespread assumption that gossip functions as a vector for the transmission of social information. This empirical study (with 14 groups of nine students each) focuses on the composition of gossip, information transfer by gossip, and the behavior based on gossip information. We show that gossip has a strong influence on the resulting behavior even when participants have access to the original information (i.e., direct observation) as well as gossip about the same information. Thus, it is evident that gossip has a strong manipulative potential. Furthermore, gossip about cooperative individuals is more positive than gossip about uncooperative individuals, gossip comments transmit social information successfully, and cooperation levels are higher when people encounter positive compared with negative gossip.cooperation ͉ reputation ͉ language ͉ manipulation