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Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust?
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....
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7820585/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33479332 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80897-8 |
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author | De Courson, Benoît Nettle, Daniel |
author_facet | De Courson, Benoît Nettle, Daniel |
author_sort | De Courson, Benoît |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7820585 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-78205852021-01-26 Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? De Courson, Benoît Nettle, Daniel Sci Rep Article 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. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-01-21 /pmc/articles/PMC7820585/ /pubmed/33479332 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80897-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 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 licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence 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 licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article De Courson, Benoît Nettle, Daniel Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? |
title | Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? |
title_full | Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? |
title_fullStr | Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? |
title_full_unstemmed | Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? |
title_short | Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? |
title_sort | why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust? |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7820585/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33479332 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80897-8 |
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