Dynamic modulation of social influence by indirect reciprocity (original) (raw)

We both think you did wrong -- How agreement shapes and is shaped by indirect reciprocity

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

Humans judge each other's actions, which at least partly functions to detect and deter cheating and to enable helpfulness in an indirect reciprocity fashion. However, most forms of judging do not only concern the action itself, but also the moral status of the receiving individual (to deter cheating it must be morally acceptable to withhold help from cheaters). This is a problem, when not everybody agrees who is good and who is bad. Although it has been widely acknowledged that disagreement may exist and that it can be detrimental for indirect reciprocity, the details of this crucial feature of moral judgments have never been studied in depth. We show, that even when everybody assesses individually (aka privately), some moral judgement systems (aka norms) can lead to high levels of agreement. We give a detailed account of the mechanisms which cause it and we show how to predict agreement analytically without requiring agent-based simulations, and for any observation rate. Finally, we show that agreement may increase or decrease reputations and therefore how much helpfulness (aka cooperation) occurs.

Experimental evidence of selective inattention in reputation-based cooperation

Scientific reports, 2018

Reputation-based cooperation is often observed in modern society. People gain several types of information by assessing others. Among these, the most important information is the actions of people and those of their recipients. However, almost all studies assume that people consider all of the information they receive. This assumption is extreme, and people engaging in reputation-based cooperation may not pay attention to some information, i.e., they may display selective inattention. We demonstrate that subjects' decision-making in relation to cooperative action depends on the content of the information they receive about their recipients. Our results show that subjects either consider or ignore information depending on the content of that information. When their recipients had cooperated previously, subjects cooperated without considering the information they received. When the recipients had played before with those who had bad reputations, subjects did not use that informati...

Cooperation under Indirect Reciprocity and Imitative Trust

PLoS ONE, 2010

Indirect reciprocity, a key concept in behavioral experiments and evolutionary game theory, provides a mechanism that allows reciprocal altruism to emerge in a population of self-regarding individuals even when repeated interactions between pairs of actors are unlikely. Recent empirical evidence show that humans typically follow complex assessment strategies involving both reciprocity and social imitation when making cooperative decisions. However, currently, we have no systematic understanding of how imitation, a mechanism that may also generate negative effects via a process of cumulative advantage, affects cooperation when repeated interactions are unlikely or information about a recipient's reputation is unavailable. Here we extend existing evolutionary models, which use an image score for reputation to track how individuals cooperate by contributing resources, by introducing a new imitative-trust score, which tracks whether actors have been the recipients of cooperation in the past. We show that imitative trust can co-exist with indirect reciprocity mechanisms up to a threshold and then cooperation reverses -revealing the elusive nature of cooperation. Moreover, we find that when information about a recipient's reputation is limited, trusting the action of third parties towards her (i.e. imitating) does favor a higher collective cooperation compared to random-trusting and share-alike mechanisms. We believe these results shed new light on the factors favoring social imitation as an adaptive mechanism in populations of cooperating social actors.

Unbounded indirect reciprocity: Is reputation-based cooperation bounded by group membership

Reputational concern is not restricted to interacting with ingroup members, but can also promote cooperation with outgroup members • Social identification did not affect cooperation with ingroup members • Reputational concern is a psychological mechanism operating also with outgroup members a b s t r a c t Bounded generalized reciprocity (BGR) predicts that people cooperate to maintain a positive reputation with ingroup, but not outgroup, members-and this explains ingroup favoritism in cooperation. We propose that the benefits of maintaining a positive reputation are not limited by group boundaries and so people may cooperate to maintain a good reputation among outgroup members when they will meet and interact with members of that group again. According to this unbounded indirect reciprocity perspective, reputation can promote cooperation with both ingroup and outgroup members. Alternatively, social identity theory (SIT) favors social identity versus reputation as an explanation for cooperation among ingroup members. We test these hypotheses across five studies (Ns = 619, 607, 613, 360, and 615) that manipulate reputation, social identification, and partner's group membership in a cooperative decision making task. Across our studies, people were more cooperative with both ingroup and outgroup members when their reputation was at stake (Studies 1-5), and reputational concern mediated the effect of cues of gossip on cooperation in interactions with ingroup and outgroup members (Studies 1-4). Social identification did not affect cooperation with ingroup members. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the indirect benefits of cooperation that can transcend group boundaries.

Reputation Effects in Public and Private Interactions

PLoS computational biology, 2015

We study the evolution of cooperation in a model of indirect reciprocity where people interact in public and private situations. Public interactions have a high chance to be observed by others and always affect reputation. Private interactions have a lower chance to be observed and only occasionally affect reputation. We explore all second order social norms and study conditions for evolutionary stability of action rules. We observe the competition between "honest" and "hypocritical" strategies. The former cooperate both in public and in private. The later cooperate in public, where many others are watching, but try to get away with defection in private situations. The hypocritical idea is that in private situations it does not pay-off to cooperate, because there is a good chance that nobody will notice it. We find simple and intuitive conditions for the evolution of honest strategies.

Indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game

2009

We study indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game. At any time only half of the subjects can build a reputation. This allows us to study both pure indirect reciprocity that is not contaminated by strategic reputation building and the impact of incentives for strategic reputation building on the helping rate. We find that while pure indirect reciprocity appears to be important, the helping choice seems to be influenced at least as much by strategic considerations. Strategic do better than non-strategic players and non-reciprocal do better than reciprocal players, casting doubt on previously proposed evolutionary explanations for indirect reciprocity.

Reputation, Gossip, and Human Cooperation

Why do people cooperate? We address this classic question by analyzing and discussing the role of reputation: people cooperate to maintain a positive reputation in their social environment. Reputation is a key element fueling a system of indirect reciprocity, where cooperators establish a good reputation and are thus more likely to receive future benefits from third parties. The tendencies to monitor, spread, and manage each other's reputation help explain the abundance of human cooperation with unrelated strangers. We review research on the phenomenon of reputation-based cooperation in the domains of how people manage their reputation in response to varying cues of reputation, when reputation can promote cooperation, and individual differences in reputation management. We also propose three directions for future research: group stability and reputation-based cooperation, solutions to cope with noise and biased reputation, and the relative efficiency of positive versus negative reputation systems.

Empathy, conformism and consensus in reputation-based cooperation with private information

2019

Explaining the emergence of cooperation remains an open challenge in theoretical ecology and human evolution. Indirect Reciprocity (IR) constitutes one of the most elaborate mechanisms that provide a way out of what is known as the cooperation dilemma, relying on concepts such as social norms and reputations. In the last decades, several social norms have been identified as active promoters of cooperation in reputation-based settings. However, such norms often rely on the assumption that every action is observed by every member of a population, an assumption that cannot always be translated into real scenarios. A consequence of lifting this assumption is that reputations cease to be absolute and objective, i.e., independent opinions on agents’ reputations will tend to diverge throughout a population, defeating the advantages offered by IR. Here we propose an Evolutionary Game Theory computational model with a ternary reputation system, configurable observability of interactions and ...

The psychological foundations of reputation-based cooperation

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021

Humans care about having a positive reputation, which may prompt them to help in scenarios where the return benefits are not obvious. Various game-theoretical models support the hypothesis that concern for reputation may stabilize cooperation beyond kin, pairs or small groups. However, such models are not explicit about the underlying psychological mechanisms that support reputation-based cooperation. These models therefore cannot account for the apparent rarity of reputation-based cooperation in other species. Here, we identify the cognitive mechanisms that may support reputation-based cooperation in the absence of language. We argue that a large working memory enhances the ability to delay gratification, to understand others' mental states (which allows for perspective-taking and attribution of intentions) and to create and follow norms, which are key building blocks for increasingly complex reputation-based cooperation. We review the existing evidence for the appearance of th...

Reputation management: Why and how gossip enhances generosity

We advance a framework for understanding why and how gossip may promote generosity and cooperation, especially in situations that can result in greater indirect benefits from others. Drawing on evolutionary theory, we derive novel hypotheses about how two reliably recurring properties of human social networks – they are “small” and contain fewer well-connected people – provide insight about when people may maximize indirect benefits of generosity. Across three studies, we find support for the hypothesis that people increase their generosity when the recipient (or an observer) is connected and can gossip to at least one or many others whom they might interact with in the future. Moreover, reputational concern, rather than expected indirect benefits from one's future partners, primarily mediated this observed gossip-based generosity, and the mediation effect of reputational concern was statistically more pronounced for proselfs than for prosocials. We discuss the importance of these findings in the context of evolutionary perspectives on human cooperation, along with some novel insights about how properties of social networks influence social behavior.