A mathematical look at empathy

Masuda, Naoki; Santos, Francisco C.

doi:10.7554/elife.47036

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…One way to restore cooperation under private moral assessment is by empathetic perspective taking 27 , 28 . Although the reputation of a focal individual may vary according to the perspective of different observers (Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adherence to public institutions that foster cooperation

2021

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Humans typically consider altruism a moral good and condition their social behavior on the moral reputations of others. Indirect reciprocity explains how social norms and reputations support cooperation: individuals cooperate with others who are considered good. Indirect reciprocity works when an institution monitors and publicly broadcasts moral reputations. Here we develop a theory of adherence to public monitoring in societies where individuals are, at first, independently responsible for evaluating the reputations of their peers. Using a mathematical model, we show that adherence to an institution of moral assessment can evolve and promote cooperation under four different social norms, including norms that previous studies found to perform poorly. We determine how an institution’s size and its degree of tolerance towards anti-social behavior affect the rate of cooperation. Public monitoring serves to eliminate disagreements about reputations, which increases cooperation and payoffs, so that adherence evolves by social contagion and remains robust against displacement.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adherence to public institutions that foster cooperation

2021

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“…We navigate through the history of IR models, noting that previous works advance social norms with varying levels of cooperation and complexity. Different social norms reveal sensitivity to specific environments: costly reputation spread [39][40][41], interaction observability [42][43][44] and empathy [45,46] are examples of determinants for cooperation recently explored resorting to IR models. With a particular focus on cognitive complexity [32,36,[47][48][49] and resorting to a complexity measure presented recently [32], we discuss those results, provide a summary of recent conclusions and point to future research avenues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The complexity of human cooperation under indirect reciprocity

Santos

Pacheco

Santos

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Indirect reciprocity (IR) is a key mechanism to understand cooperation among unrelated individuals. It involves reputations and complex information processing, arising from social interactions. By helping someone, individuals may improve their reputation, which may be shared in a population and change the predisposition of others to reciprocate in the future. The reputation of individuals depends, in turn, on social norms that define a good or bad action, offering a computational and mathematical appealing way of studying the evolution of moral systems. Over the years, theoretical and empirical research has unveiled many features of cooperation under IR, exploring norms with varying degrees of complexity and information requirements. Recent results suggest that costly reputation spread, interaction observability and empathy are determinants of cooperation under IR. Importantly, such characteristics probably impact the level of complexity and information requirements for IR to sustain cooperation. In this review, we present and discuss those recent results. We provide a synthesis of theoretical models and discuss previous conclusions through the lens of evolutionary game theory and cognitive complexity. We highlight open questions and suggest future research in this domain. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.

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