Abstract
Societal threats are ubiquitous. To overcome collective threats, cooperation is essential. However, not all societies are equally successful in cooperating under threat. With three agent-based models based on an Evolutionary Game Theoretic framework, we argue that the strength of social norms, or cultural tightness-looseness, plays a critical role in whether and how a society can effectively adopt cooperative norms and fight against an evolving threat. In the first model, we show that under a constantly increasing threat, a tight society with more conformity pressures adopts cooperative norms faster than a loose society. In the second model, we show that when mass cooperation can slow down the escalation of threat, a tight society will ultimately have a lower threat than a loose society in most cases. In the third model, we show that even after the threat has gradually decreased, a tight society that has evolved cooperative norms can maintain a highly cooperative equi librium for a long time. These findings are consistent with empirical research on the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shown that tighter societies have fewer cases and deaths per million as compared with loose societies in the COVID-19 pandemic threat (Gelfand et al., 2021).
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