Abstract
Understanding the factors that promote, disrupt, or shape the nature of cooperation is one of the main tasks of evolutionary biology. Here, we focus on attitudes and beliefs supportive of in-group favoritism and strict adherence to moral consensus, collectively known as ideological rigidity, that have been linked with both ends of the political spectrum. The presence among the political right and the left is likely to make ideological rigidity a major determinant of the political discourse with an important social function. To better understand this function, we equip the indirect reciprocity framework – widely used to explain evaluation-mediated social cooperation – with multiple stylized value systems, each corresponding to the different degree of ideological rigidity. By running game theoretical simulations, we observe the competitive evolution of these systems, map conditions that lead to more ideologically rigid societies, and identify potentially disastrous outcomes. In particular, we uncover that barriers to cooperation aid ideological rigidity. The society may even polarize to the extent where social parasites overrun the population and cause the complete collapse of the social structure. These results have implications for lawmakers globally, warning against restrictive or protectionist policies.
Highlights
Factors affecting cooperation in a society, such as attitudes, beliefs, and resulting value systems, are a subject of major interest in evolutionary biology
We set to investigate the social function of ideological rigidity, starting from a motivational premise that indirect reciprocity – a cooperation maintaining mechanism based on the evaluation of the reputation [3] – provides a proper framework for our investigation
Corresponding ideas are again found in the indirect reciprocity framework, where social norms subjected to the evolutionary competition [7,8] handle dissent from moral consensus in different ways
Summary
Factors affecting cooperation in a society, such as attitudes, beliefs, and resulting value systems, are a subject of major interest in evolutionary biology. We set to investigate the social function of ideological rigidity, starting from a motivational premise that indirect reciprocity – a cooperation maintaining mechanism based on the evaluation of the reputation [3] – provides a proper framework for our investigation. To establish this premise, we emphasize the dual nature of the aforementioned attitudes and beliefs. Ideologically rigid believe in the supremacy of one’s group or, at least, distrust anyone who is not a member of this group Such a belief, broadly termed in-group favoritism, represents an attractive phenomenon for the studies on indirect reciprocity [4,5,6]. Our aim is to unify these ideas by incorporating the dual nature of ideological rigidity into stylized value systems and examine the consequent evolutionary dynamics
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