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Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
The maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for the prosperity of human societies. Empirical studies show that high cooperation is frequently associated with the presence of strong social ties, but they are silent on whether a causal mechanism exists, how it operates, and what features of...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6659657/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31350455 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47278-2 |
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author | Gallo, Edoardo Riyanto, Yohanes E. Teh, Tat-How Roy, Nilanjan |
author_facet | Gallo, Edoardo Riyanto, Yohanes E. Teh, Tat-How Roy, Nilanjan |
author_sort | Gallo, Edoardo |
collection | PubMed |
description | The maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for the prosperity of human societies. Empirical studies show that high cooperation is frequently associated with the presence of strong social ties, but they are silent on whether a causal mechanism exists, how it operates, and what features of the social environment are conducive to its emergence. Here we show experimentally that strong ties increase cooperation and welfare by enabling the emergence of a close-knit and strongly bound cooperative elite. Crucially, this cooperative elite is more prevalent in social environments characterized by a large payoff difference between weak and strong ties, and no gradation in the process of strengthening a tie. These features allow cooperative individuals to adopt an all or nothing strategy to tie strengthening based on the well-known mechanism of direct reciprocity: participants become very selective by forming strong ties only with other cooperative individuals and severing ties with everyone else. Once formed, these strong ties are persistent and enhance cooperation. A dichotomous society emerges with cooperators prospering in a close-knit, strongly bound elite, and defectors earning low payoffs in a weakly connected periphery. Methodologically, our set-up provides a framework to investigate the role of the strength of ties in an experimental setting. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6659657 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-66596572019-08-01 Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites Gallo, Edoardo Riyanto, Yohanes E. Teh, Tat-How Roy, Nilanjan Sci Rep Article The maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for the prosperity of human societies. Empirical studies show that high cooperation is frequently associated with the presence of strong social ties, but they are silent on whether a causal mechanism exists, how it operates, and what features of the social environment are conducive to its emergence. Here we show experimentally that strong ties increase cooperation and welfare by enabling the emergence of a close-knit and strongly bound cooperative elite. Crucially, this cooperative elite is more prevalent in social environments characterized by a large payoff difference between weak and strong ties, and no gradation in the process of strengthening a tie. These features allow cooperative individuals to adopt an all or nothing strategy to tie strengthening based on the well-known mechanism of direct reciprocity: participants become very selective by forming strong ties only with other cooperative individuals and severing ties with everyone else. Once formed, these strong ties are persistent and enhance cooperation. A dichotomous society emerges with cooperators prospering in a close-knit, strongly bound elite, and defectors earning low payoffs in a weakly connected periphery. Methodologically, our set-up provides a framework to investigate the role of the strength of ties in an experimental setting. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-07-26 /pmc/articles/PMC6659657/ /pubmed/31350455 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47278-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Gallo, Edoardo Riyanto, Yohanes E. Teh, Tat-How Roy, Nilanjan Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites |
title | Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites |
title_full | Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites |
title_fullStr | Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites |
title_full_unstemmed | Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites |
title_short | Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites |
title_sort | strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6659657/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31350455 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47278-2 |
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