Abstract
Humans typically consider altruism a moral good and condition their social behavior on the moral reputations of others. Indirect reciprocity explains how social norms and reputations support cooperation: individuals cooperate with others who are considered good. Indirect reciprocity works when an institution monitors and publicly broadcasts moral reputations. Here we develop a theory of adherence to public monitoring in societies where individuals are, at first, independently responsible for evaluating the reputations of their peers. Using a mathematical model, we show that adherence to an institution of moral assessment can evolve and promote cooperation under four different social norms, including norms that previous studies found to perform poorly. We determine how an institution’s size and its degree of tolerance towards anti-social behavior affect the rate of cooperation. Public monitoring serves to eliminate disagreements about reputations, which increases cooperation and payoffs, so that adherence evolves by social contagion and remains robust against displacement.
Highlights
Humans typically consider altruism a moral good and condition their social behavior on the moral reputations of others
Moral reputations are directly related to cooperation, and cooperation in turn can lead to higher social status[10], while kindness towards people of bad moral standing is sometimes punished[11]
The frequencies of these three strategies in the population evolve via social contagion – that is, individuals tend to copy the strategies of more successful players
Summary
Humans typically consider altruism a moral good and condition their social behavior on the moral reputations of others. Indirect reciprocity explains how social norms and reputations support cooperation: individuals cooperate with others who are considered good. Indirect reciprocity works when an institution monitors and publicly broadcasts moral reputations. We develop a theory of adherence to public monitoring in societies where individuals are, at first, independently responsible for evaluating the reputations of their peers. Evolutionary game theory provides a convenient framework to study human behavior governed by social norms, reputations, and community enforcement[15]. In such models of indirect reciprocity, a donor’s action (to cooperate or not) depends on the recipient’s moral reputation (“good” or “bad”). For example, assigns a good reputation to those who refuse to help individuals of bad moral standing and to those who cooperate with other good members of the society[3,18]
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