The interplay of cognition and cooperation

Abstract

Cooperation often involves behaviours that reduce immediate payoffs for actors. Delayed benefits have often been argued to pose problems for the evolution of cooperation because learning such contingencies may be difficult as partners may cheat in return. Therefore, the ability to achieve stable cooperation has often been linked to a species' cognitive abilities, which is in turn linked to the evolution of increasingly complex central nervous systems. However, in their famous 1981 paper, Axelrod and Hamilton stated that in principle even bacteria could play a tit-for-tat strategy in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. While to our knowledge this has not been documented, interspecific mutualisms are present in bacteria, plants and fungi. Moreover, many species which have evolved large brains in complex social environments lack convincing evidence in favour of reciprocity. What conditions must be fulfilled so that organisms with little to no brainpower, including plants and single-celled organisms, can, on average, gain benefits from interactions with partner species? On the other hand, what conditions favour the evolution of large brains and flexible behaviour, which includes the use of misinformation and so on? These questions are critical, as they begin to address why cognitive complexity would emerge when 'simple' cooperation is clearly sufficient in some cases. This paper spans the literature from bacteria to humans in our search for the key variables that link cooperation and deception to cognition.

Punishment and spite, the dark side of cooperation

“…As will be discussed here and elsewhere in this volume (Brosnan et al 2010b;Gächter et al 2010;Melis & Semmann 2010), harm, and the threat of it, can be powerful inducements for cooperation. Functionally, punishment-also referred to as negative reciprocity, coercion, harassment and return-benefits spite-is likely to be important for maintaining cooperation.…”

“…Some economists, sociologists and psychologists (behaviourists, also called learning theorists, whom are adamantly non-mentalistic) take a functional approach, focusing on the immediate consequences for the actor or recipient. Using the same terms, social scientists would arrive at a similar table (see table 1 in Brosnan et al 2010b;Bshary & Bergmü ller 2008). A proximate approach tries to determine the mechanisms underlying the behaviour, not just accounting costs and benefits.…”

“…1 Specifically, I will concentrate on intentions and motivations (see also Hauser et al 2009). This terminology is a departure from the useful approach advocated by the editors of this volume (see §1 and table 1 in Brosnan et al 2010b;Bshary & Bergmü ller 2008). However, because I move back and forth from evolutionary to functional to psychological levels of explanation, the latter of which is not included in the Bshary and Bergmü ller taxonomy, the simple approach I will use will hopefully generate the least amount of confusion.…”

When should cuckolded males care for extra-pair offspring?

“…Despite these simplifications, we believe that our model captures the essence of a biological mechanism likely to be relevant in natural systems in which a key assumption holds; namely, that cuckolded males care for unrelated offspring which later help their (half-) siblings, including the focal male's own offspring. This principle may not be limited to cooperative breeders, but may apply in various vertebrate systems in which cooperation between (half-) siblings occurs (for reviews on cooperation, see [27,28]). …”

Power and temptation cause shifts between exploitation and cooperation in a cleaner wrasse mutualism

“…Variable conditions may affect cooperation in many ways, as through the effects of internal states on behaviour [22,33] or through the introduction of errors owing to uncertainty: the 'trembling hand' [34] is a key variable promoting cooperation, and variable conditions may provide a biological basis for errors. Furthermore, variable conditions may select for increased cognitive abilities necessary to fine-tune behaviour [35], but also for the development of simple rules of thumb that do overall well while largely ignoring the complexity of the environment [36]. In both cases, decision rules of individuals have to be known to determine under which conditions cooperation is stable.…”