Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust?

Abstract

Humans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitation to explore why this should be. Distinctively, our model features a desperation threshold, a level of resources below which it is extremely damaging to fall. Agents do not belong to fixed types, but condition their behaviour on their current resource level and the behaviour in the population around them. We show that the optimal action for individuals who are close to the desperation threshold is to exploit others. This remains true even in the presence of severe and probable punishment for exploitation, since successful exploitation is the quickest route out of desperation, whereas being punished does not make already desperate states much worse. Simulated populations with a sufficiently unequal distribution of resources rapidly evolve an equilibrium of low trust and zero cooperation: desperate individuals try to exploit, and non-desperate individuals avoid interaction altogether. Making the distribution of resources more equal or increasing social mobility is generally effective in producing a high cooperation, high trust equilibrium; increasing punishment severity is not.

Optimal resource allocation and its consequences on behavioral strategies, personality traits and preferences

“…We should therefore observe that people's risk aversion is calibrated by the amount of resources they have at their disposal to fulfill their needs. Evidence supports the existence of this mechanism as poorer individuals tend to take less risks in terms of variance (Amir et al, 2018;Banerjee & Duflo, 2011;Haushofer & Fehr, 2014;Nielsen et al, 2013;Refaie & Mishra, 2020;Tanaka et al, 2010), unless they are below a "desperation threshold" in which their marginal benefit curve is convex (De Courson & Nettle, 2021). Research shows that individuals with fewer resources are more likely to select the outcome with the smaller variance when presented with different lotteries than wealthier individuals are (Amir et al, 2018;Refaie & Mishra, 2020).…”

What is the expected human childhood? Insights from evolutionary anthropology

“…Nonetheless, in the aggregate, scarcity and unpredictability tend to increase competition-related violence. When individuals are close to a "desperation threshold," a level of resources below which it is highly undesirable or even fatal to fall (De Courson & Nettle, 2021;Mishra et al, 2017;Stephens, 1981), individuals might resort to aggression to obtain vital resources (Ellis et al, 2012;Hawley, 2015;Hawley et al, 2007;Turnbull, 1972;Volk et al, 2012). When there are enough vital resources, cooperative strategies may re-emerge (Townsend et al, 2020).…”

Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies

“…Finally, behavioral sciences have shown that some cognitive preferences adaptively vary in response to changes in the local environment, especially changes in the level of resources ( Frankenhuis et al, 2016 ; Pepper and Nettle, 2017 ; Baumard, 2019 ; de Courson and Baumard, 2019 ; Mell et al, 2019 ; Boon-Falleur et al, 2020 ; De Courson and Nettle, 2021 ). For instance, higher levels of affluence, predictability and safeness makes people more future-oriented ( Mell et al, 2019 ; Boon-Falleur et al, 2020 ; Guillou et al, 2020 ), more optimist ( Nettle, 2012 ; Inglehart, 2020 ), more cooperative ( Baumard, 2019 ; Jacquet et al, 2019 ), more tolerant ( Inglehart, 2018 ), more romantic ( Baumard et al, 2021 ; Martins and Baumard, 2021 ), and more explorative ( Eliassen et al, 2007 ; Maspons et al, 2019 ; Gopnik, 2020 ).…”