Abstract
Indirect reciprocity is one of the major mechanisms in the evolution of human cooperation. In indirect reciprocity, social norms with which individuals distinguish good people from bad people play essential roles. Despite extensive studies on the evolution of cooperation in indirect reciprocity, little is known about which social norms people actually adopt. Here we reveal what kind of norms are adopted by people in indirect reciprocal situations in daily life by using scenario-based experiments. The results showed that people evaluated “justified defection” as neither good nor bad and withheld their evaluation. Theoretically, social norms that evaluate justified defection as good are required for cooperation to be stable. However, the norm that people actually adopted deviates from the theoretical predictions. Our results indicate the necessity to reconsider the justification of “justified defection” in the evolution of cooperation.
Highlights
Mutual cooperation in a competitive situation has been an essential driver in the development of human society, but its mechanism is a difficult puzzle to solve
To stabilize cooperation through indirect reciprocity, a norm is needed that prescribes regarding as good restaurant worker personal advice economic game
Some empirical evidence has indicated that people use simple norms to rate cooperation as good and defection as bad [19]
Summary
Mutual cooperation in a competitive situation has been an essential driver in the development of human society, but its mechanism is a difficult puzzle to solve. For indirect reciprocity to work, norms are needed that distinguish good people from bad people so that cooperation is selectively directed to good people. The simplest norm of indirect reciprocity is image-scoring [3,4], which refers only to firstorder information. Second-order information is needed to sustain cooperation in indirect reciprocity. The major norms that use second-order information consist of stern-judging [10,11], simple-standing [1,5,12], and shunning [13]. As for the second-order information, it is crucial to consider the assessment rule when the player’s recipient has a bad reputation because evaluating the action of the player to a good recipient is easy. Cooperation with and defection against the good should respectively be evaluated as good and bad
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