Quantitative determination of the level of cooperation in the presence of punishment in three public good experiments

Abstract

Strong reciprocity is a fundamental human characteristic associated with our extraordinary sociality and cooperation. Laboratory experiments on social dilemma games and many field studies have quantified well-defined levels of cooperation and propensity to punish/reward. The level of cooperation is observed to be strongly dependent on the availability of punishments and/or rewards. Here, we propose an operational approach based on the evolutionary selection of prosocial behaviors to explain the quantitative level of the propensity to punish in three experimental set-ups. A simple cost/benefit analysis at the level of a single agent, who anticipates the action of her fellows, determines an optimal level of altruistic punishment, which explains quantitatively experimental results on a third-party punishment game, the ultimatum game and an altruistic punishment game. We also report numerical simulations of an evolutionary agent-based model of repeated agent interactions with feedback by punishments, which confirms that the propensity to punish is a robust emergent property selected by the evolutionary rules of the model. The cost-benefit reasoning is not to be taken literally but rather to embody the result of the selection pressure of coevolving agents that have make them converge to their preferences (which can be seen as either hard-wired and/or culturally selected). In this view, the prosocial preference of humans is a collective emergent process, robustly selected by adaptation and selection. Our main contribution is to use evolutionary feedback selection to quantify the value of the prosocial propensity to punish, and test this prediction on three different experimental set-ups.

Predicting Decisions in Human Social Interactions Using Real-Time fMRI and Pattern Classification

“…The percentages of acceptance for the five types of offers are depicted in Figure 4 . The acceptance/rejection ratios are in accordance with previous studies employing the repeated UG [39] – [41] . A dramatic drop in the acceptance rate for offers around 20% or less of the amount to be split indicates that these offers were judged as unfair by our participants.…”

Strong gender differences in reproductive success variance, and the times to the most recent common ancestors

“…Furthermore, within-group cooperation might be maintained or enhanced by between-groups competition, although this is debated (Bowles (2006) argues in this sense but is contradicted by Langergraber et al (2011)). Finally, one of us implemented an ABM of a public good game with altruistic punishment and found that cooperation can thrive among selfish disadvantageous inequity averse agents (Hetzer and Sornette, 2009), a conclusion also supported by game theoretical calculations (Darcet and Sornette, 2008;Hetzer and Sornette, 2001). This suggests that competitive agents still find it advantageous to cooperate in order to achieve their goals.…”

Other-Regarding Preferences and Altruistic Punishment: A Darwinian Perspective

“…Note that the value of the mode around k = 0.2 is close to the slope of the straight line fitting the empirical data shown in figure 1 providing another confirmation of the explanatory power of our ABM. This most probable value k = 0.2 has also been obtained analytically by assuming an evolutionary optimization of the expected gains with respect to potential future losses due to punishment [34].…”