Punishment can promote defection in group-structured populations

Powers, Simon T.; Taylor, Daniel J.; Bryson, Joanna J.

doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.07.010

Cited by 33 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…A wide range of evolutionary game theory models have explained the co-evolution of cooperation and punishment by assuming that these two traits are linked [34][35][36][37] . Our results suggest that these models should be revisited (for example, using models with expanded strategy sets where cooperation and punishment vary separately [38][39][40][41][42][43] ).…”

Section: Article Nature Communications | Doi: 101038/ncomms5939mentioning

confidence: 99%

Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable

2014

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Understanding human cooperation is of major interest across the natural and social sciences. But it is unclear to what extent cooperation is actually a general concept. Most research on cooperation has implicitly assumed that a person's behaviour in one cooperative context is related to their behaviour in other settings, and at later times. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of this assumption. Here, we provide such evidence by collecting thousands of game decisions from over 1,400 individuals. A person's decisions in different cooperation games are correlated, as are those decisions and both self-report and real-effort measures of cooperation in non-game contexts. Equally strong correlations exist between cooperative decisions made an average of 124 days apart. Importantly, we find that cooperation is not correlated with norm-enforcing punishment or non-competitiveness. We conclude that there is a domain-general and temporally stable inclination towards paying costs to benefit others, which we dub the 'cooperative phenotype'.

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Section: Article Nature Communications | Doi: 101038/ncomms5939mentioning

confidence: 99%

Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable

2014

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“…Although mutual cooperation would be optimal for all involved, a higher payoff, at least in the short term, is possible by exploiting the cooperative efforts of others. An often explored remedy is to punish defectors who do not contribute to the public good [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], or to reward cooperators who do contribute to the public good [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. However, the problem with both actions is that they are costly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition of tolerant strategies in the spatial public goods game

2016

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Tolerance implies enduring trying circumstances with a fair and objective attitude. To determine whether evolutionary advantages might be stemming from diverse levels of tolerance in a population, we study a spatial public goods game, where in addition to cooperators, defectors, and loners, tolerant players are also present. Depending on the number of defectors within a group, a tolerant player can either cooperate in or abstain from a particular instance of the game. We show that the diversity of tolerance can give rise to synergistic effects, wherein players with a different threshold in terms of the tolerated number of defectors in a group compete most effectively against defection and default abstinence. Such synergistic associations can stabilise states of full cooperation where otherwise defection would dominate. We observe complex pattern formation that gives rise to an intricate phase diagram, where invisible yet stable strategy alliances require outmost care lest they are overlooked. Our results highlight the delicate importance of diversity and tolerance for the provisioning of public goods, and they reveal fascinating subtleties of the spatiotemporal dynamics that is due to the competition of subsystem solutions in structured populations.

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“…Interestingly, anti-social punishment is still something missing from pool-punishment models so far [29,33]. Allowing this rather intriguing strategy in models of peer punishment drastically alters the dynamics, and often prevents cooperators from dominating [50,51]. However, this deleterious effect depends on the model's settings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of anti-social rewarding and its countermeasures in public goods games

Santos

2015

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Cooperation in joint enterprises can easily break down when self-interests are in conflict with collective benefits, causing a tragedy of the commons. In such social dilemmas, the possibility for contributors to invest in a common pool-rewards fund, which will be shared exclusively among contributors, can be powerful for averting the tragedy, as long as the second-order dilemma (i.e. withdrawing contribution to reward funds) can be overcome (e.g. with second-order sanctions). However, the present paper reveals the vulnerability of such pool-rewarding mechanisms to the presence of reward funds raised by defectors and shared among them (i.e. anti-social rewarding), as it causes a cooperation breakdown, even when secondorder sanctions are possible. I demonstrate that escaping this social trap requires the additional condition that coalitions of defectors fare poorly compared with pro-socials, with either (i) better rewarding abilities for the latter or (ii) reward funds that are contingent upon the public good produced beforehand, allowing groups of contributors to invest more in reward funds than groups of defectors. These results suggest that the establishment of cooperation through a collective positive incentive mechanism is highly vulnerable to anti-social rewarding and requires additional countermeasures to act in combination with second-order sanctions.

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Punishment can promote defection in group-structured populations

Cited by 33 publications

References 56 publications

Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable

Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable

Competition of tolerant strategies in the spatial public goods game

The evolution of anti-social rewarding and its countermeasures in public goods games

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