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Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies

Many animal and human societies exhibit hierarchical structures with different degrees of steepness. Some of these societies also show cooperative behavior, where cooperation means working together for a common benefit. However, there is an increasing evidence that rigidly enforced hierarchies lead...

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Autores principales: Lozano, Pablo, Gavrilets, Sergey, Sánchez, Angel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7506014/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32958841
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71664-w
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author Lozano, Pablo
Gavrilets, Sergey
Sánchez, Angel
author_facet Lozano, Pablo
Gavrilets, Sergey
Sánchez, Angel
author_sort Lozano, Pablo
collection PubMed
description Many animal and human societies exhibit hierarchical structures with different degrees of steepness. Some of these societies also show cooperative behavior, where cooperation means working together for a common benefit. However, there is an increasing evidence that rigidly enforced hierarchies lead to a decrease of cooperation in both human and non-human primates. In this work, we address this issue by means of an evolutionary agent-based model that incorporates fights as social interactions governing a dynamic ranking, communal work to produce a public good, and norm internalization, i.e. a process where acting according to a norm becomes a goal in itself. Our model also includes the perception of how much the individual is going to retain from her cooperative behavior in future interactions. The predictions of the model resemble the principal characteristics of human societies. When ranking is unconstrained, we observe a high concentration of agents in low scores, while a few ones climb up the social hierarchy and exploit the rest, with no norm internalization. If ranking is constrained, thus leading to bounded score differences between agents, individual positions in the ranking change more, and the typical structure shows a division of the society in upper and lower classes. In this case, we observe that there is a significant degree of norm internalization, supporting large fractions of the population cooperating in spite of the rank differences. Our main results are robust with respect to the model parameters and to the type of rank constraint. We thus provide a mechanism that can explain how hierarchy arises in initially egalitarian societies while keeping a large degree of cooperation.
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spelling pubmed-75060142020-09-22 Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies Lozano, Pablo Gavrilets, Sergey Sánchez, Angel Sci Rep Article Many animal and human societies exhibit hierarchical structures with different degrees of steepness. Some of these societies also show cooperative behavior, where cooperation means working together for a common benefit. However, there is an increasing evidence that rigidly enforced hierarchies lead to a decrease of cooperation in both human and non-human primates. In this work, we address this issue by means of an evolutionary agent-based model that incorporates fights as social interactions governing a dynamic ranking, communal work to produce a public good, and norm internalization, i.e. a process where acting according to a norm becomes a goal in itself. Our model also includes the perception of how much the individual is going to retain from her cooperative behavior in future interactions. The predictions of the model resemble the principal characteristics of human societies. When ranking is unconstrained, we observe a high concentration of agents in low scores, while a few ones climb up the social hierarchy and exploit the rest, with no norm internalization. If ranking is constrained, thus leading to bounded score differences between agents, individual positions in the ranking change more, and the typical structure shows a division of the society in upper and lower classes. In this case, we observe that there is a significant degree of norm internalization, supporting large fractions of the population cooperating in spite of the rank differences. Our main results are robust with respect to the model parameters and to the type of rank constraint. We thus provide a mechanism that can explain how hierarchy arises in initially egalitarian societies while keeping a large degree of cooperation. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-09-21 /pmc/articles/PMC7506014/ /pubmed/32958841 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71664-w Text en © The Author(s) 2020 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
Lozano, Pablo
Gavrilets, Sergey
Sánchez, Angel
Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies
title Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies
title_full Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies
title_fullStr Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies
title_full_unstemmed Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies
title_short Cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies
title_sort cooperation, social norm internalization, and hierarchical societies
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7506014/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32958841
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71664-w
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