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Cooperation without punishment
A fundamental question in social and biological sciences is whether self-governance is possible when individual and collective interests are in conflict. Free riding poses a major challenge to self-governance, and a prominent solution to this challenge has been altruistic punishment. However, this s...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9867775/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36681708 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28372-y |
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author | Battu, Balaraju Rahwan, Talal |
author_facet | Battu, Balaraju Rahwan, Talal |
author_sort | Battu, Balaraju |
collection | PubMed |
description | A fundamental question in social and biological sciences is whether self-governance is possible when individual and collective interests are in conflict. Free riding poses a major challenge to self-governance, and a prominent solution to this challenge has been altruistic punishment. However, this solution is ineffective when counter-punishments are possible and when social interactions are noisy. We set out to address these shortcomings, motivated by the fact that most people behave like conditional cooperators—individuals willing to cooperate if a critical number of others do so. In our evolutionary model, the population contains heterogeneous conditional cooperators whose decisions depend on past cooperation levels. The population plays a repeated public goods game in a moderately noisy environment where individuals can occasionally commit mistakes in their cooperative decisions and in their imitation of the role models’ strategies. We show that, under moderate levels of noise, injecting a few altruists into the population triggers positive reciprocity among conditional cooperators, thereby providing a novel mechanism to establish stable cooperation. More broadly, our findings indicate that self-governance is possible while avoiding the detrimental effects of punishment, and suggest that society should focus on creating a critical amount of trust to harness the conditional nature of its members. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9867775 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-98677752023-01-23 Cooperation without punishment Battu, Balaraju Rahwan, Talal Sci Rep Article A fundamental question in social and biological sciences is whether self-governance is possible when individual and collective interests are in conflict. Free riding poses a major challenge to self-governance, and a prominent solution to this challenge has been altruistic punishment. However, this solution is ineffective when counter-punishments are possible and when social interactions are noisy. We set out to address these shortcomings, motivated by the fact that most people behave like conditional cooperators—individuals willing to cooperate if a critical number of others do so. In our evolutionary model, the population contains heterogeneous conditional cooperators whose decisions depend on past cooperation levels. The population plays a repeated public goods game in a moderately noisy environment where individuals can occasionally commit mistakes in their cooperative decisions and in their imitation of the role models’ strategies. We show that, under moderate levels of noise, injecting a few altruists into the population triggers positive reciprocity among conditional cooperators, thereby providing a novel mechanism to establish stable cooperation. More broadly, our findings indicate that self-governance is possible while avoiding the detrimental effects of punishment, and suggest that society should focus on creating a critical amount of trust to harness the conditional nature of its members. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-01-21 /pmc/articles/PMC9867775/ /pubmed/36681708 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28372-y Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis 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/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Battu, Balaraju Rahwan, Talal Cooperation without punishment |
title | Cooperation without punishment |
title_full | Cooperation without punishment |
title_fullStr | Cooperation without punishment |
title_full_unstemmed | Cooperation without punishment |
title_short | Cooperation without punishment |
title_sort | cooperation without punishment |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9867775/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36681708 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28372-y |
work_keys_str_mv | AT battubalaraju cooperationwithoutpunishment AT rahwantalal cooperationwithoutpunishment |