English

Controlling sternness in judging a good person who helps the bad

Physics and Society 2025-09-30 v1 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

Recent studies on indirect reciprocity with private assessment on complete graphs suggest the possibility that one can continuously modulate the degree of segregation by controlling how to judge a good person helping a bad one. A well-known social norm called L6 judges it as bad, which eventually segregates the society into two antagonistic clusters, but if it is judged as good, the system reaches paradise where everyone likes each other. In this work, we numerically study this transition between segregation and paradise in two different settings. Firstly, in a uniform population of size NN where everyone regards such a donor as good with probability pp and bad with 1p1-p, we observe paradise when NpNp is sufficiently greater than O(1)O(1). In contrast, in a heterogeneous setting where only kk individuals judge such a donor as good, the size difference of the clusters increases almost linearly as kk increases, so paradise can only be reached as kNk \to N in a large population. Therefore, when an urgent change is needed to overcome the segregation due to L6, a small change in each and every individual's behavior is more efficient than a radical change in a fraction of the population.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.24614,
  title  = {Controlling sternness in judging a good person who helps the bad},
  author = {Quang Anh Le and Minwoo Bae and Takashi Shimada and Seung Ki Baek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.24614},
  year   = {2025}
}