Cooperative Norms and the Growth of Threat: Differences Across Tight and Loose Cultures

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).