Many animal and human societies exhibit hierarchical structures with different degrees of steepness. Some of these societies also show cooperative behavior, where cooperation means working together for a common benefit. However, there is an increasing evidence that rigidly enforced hierarchies lead to a decrease of cooperation in both human and non-human primates. In this work, we address this issue by means of an evolutionary agent-based model that incorporates fights as social interactions governing a dynamic ranking, communal work to produce a public good, and norm internalization, i.e. a process where acting according to a norm becomes a goal in itself. Our model also includes the perception of how much the individual is going to retain from her cooperative behavior in future interactions. The predictions of the model resemble the principal characteristics of human societies. When ranking is unconstrained, we observe a high concentration of agents in low scores, while a few ones climb up the social hierarchy and exploit the rest, with no norm internalization. If ranking is constrained, thus leading to bounded score differences between agents, individual positions in the ranking change more, and the typical structure shows a division of the society in upper and lower classes. In this case, we observe that there is a significant degree of norm internalization, supporting large fractions of the population cooperating in spite of the rank differences. Our main results are robust with respect to the model parameters and to the type of rank constraint. We thus provide a mechanism that can explain how hierarchy arises in initially egalitarian societies while keeping a large degree of cooperation.
Reputation plays a key role among the mechanisms supporting cooperation in our society. This is a well-known observation and, in fact, several studies have shown that reputation may substantially increase cooperation among subjects playing Prisoner’s Dilemma games in the laboratory. Unfortunately, recent experiments indicate that when reputation can be faked cooperation can still be maintained at the expense of honest subjects who are deceived by the dishonest ones. As experimental work is limited due to financial and other reasons, we present here an agent-based simulation model inspired by, and calibrated against, the results obtained in the experiment. We thus simulate much larger population sizes over longer times, and test other model parameters to see whether the observed behavior generalizes in those yet untried conditions. The results show that the collective behavior is qualitatively similar in larger systems and stable over longer times horizons. We conclude that the findings of the experimental work are meaningful, taking into account that the model is strictly tailored to our particular experimental setting and therefore it is a possible explanation of our observations whose applicability to other contexts requires further research. We argue that simulations like the ones presented here may also be useful to cheaply and quickly suggest settings and options to enhance and facilitate further experiments, which, in turn, may provide new tests of the models themselves.
Previous research suggests that it is difficult to maintain cooperation in a large society when there is a strong hierarchical structure. In this study, we implement online human experiments to study the effects of exogenous variation in a particular notion of hierarchy on cooperation and conflict within groups. We demonstrate how cooperation can be maintained when collective action is accompanied by dyadic conflicts whose outcome feeds back on the hierarchical rank of the contestants. We find that the majority of individuals take part in conflicts and that highly-ranked individuals mostly cooperate and engage in conflicts as a way to punish non-cooperators. As a consequence, stable hierarchical groups can arise and maintain high levels of cooperation. Our results are in agreement with the prediction of earlier theoretical models on hierarchical societies and are relevant to understanding the interplay of hierarchy, cooperation and conflict.
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