Related papers: Altruism may arise from individual selection
Strong reciprocity is a fundamental human characteristic associated with our extraordinary sociality and cooperation. Laboratory experiments on social dilemma games and many field studies have quantified well-defined levels of cooperation…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
Actions such as sharing food and cooperating to reach a common goal have played a fundamental role in the evolution of human societies. These good actions may not maximise the actor's payoff, but they maximise the other's payoff.…
Experimental evidence suggests that human decisions involve a mixture of self-interest and internalized social norms which cannot be accounted for by the Nash equilibrium behavior of Homo Oeconomicus. This led to the notion of strong…
Experimental studies have shown the ubiquity of altruistic behavior in human societies. The social structure is a fundamental ingredient to understand the degree of altruism displayed by the members of a society, in contrast to…
Human behavior is one of the main problems for evolution, as it is often the case that human actions are disadvantageous for the self and advantageous for other people. Behind this puzzle are our beliefs about rational behavior, based on…
A large body of empirical evidence suggests that humans are willing to engage in costly punishment of defectors in public goods games. Based on such pieces of evidence, it is suggested that punishment serves an important role in promoting…
Many biological and social systems show significant levels of collective action. Several cooperation mechanisms have been proposed, yet they have been mostly studied independently. Among these, direct reciprocity supports cooperation on the…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
The evolution and maintenance of cooperation fascinated researchers for several decades. Recently, theoretical models and experimental evidence show that costly punishment may facilitate cooperation in human societies, but may not be used…
Cooperation lies at the foundations of human societies, yet why people cooperate remains a conundrum. The issue, known as network reciprocity, of whether population structure can foster cooperative behavior in social dilemmas has been…
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on…
People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…
Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…
Human decision behaviour is quite diverse. In many games humans on average do not achieve maximal payoff and the behaviour of individual players remains inhomogeneous even after playing many rounds. For instance, in repeated prisoner…
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should…
Understanding the origins of volunteerism and free-riding is crucial in collective action situations where a sufficient number of cooperators is necessary to achieve shared benefits, such as in vaccination campaigns and social change…
Direct reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for evolution of cooperation based on repeated interactions between the same individuals. But high levels of cooperation evolve only if the benefit-to-cost ratio exceeds a certain threshold that…
Direct reciprocity facilitates the evolution of cooperation when individuals interact repeatedly. Most previous studies on direct reciprocity implicitly assume compulsory interactions. Yet, interactions are often voluntary in human…
People often engage in costly cooperation, especially in repeated interactions. When deciding whether to cooperate, individuals typically take into account how others have acted in the past. For instance, when one person is deciding whether…