Abstract
Social living groups are organised in social hierarchies often exhibiting inequalities in beings. Investigating class segregation and the use of punishment applied downward in the rank acts as a key aspect to ascertain how dominant and subordinate partners cooperate to achieve mutual profit. In human subjects coming from countries with an uneven wealth distribution, this mutual profit may be reduced, especially for the lower socioeconomic classes. We implemented an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game experiment in one such country with starkly high inequality, China. We split relatively richer and poorer subjects into separate classes and gave only one the authority to punish the other. When rich subjects could unidirectionally punish poor subjects (as in a segregated society), rich subjects decreased their cooperation effort while punishing poor subjects. When rich and poor subjects, instead, could punish each other in random combinations (as in an integrated society) they decreased defections so they could punish more. In the segregated society model, the punishing classes earned twice as much as the non-punishers. Conversely, in the integrated society model, weak differences in earnings were found, leading to a decrease in inequality. These results were confirmed by an agent-based simulation mirroring the human experiments and repeated during a very large number of rounds. From our research, we conclude that, especially in developing economies, if the states enacted that the dominant and subordinate individuals relinquished their almost segregated state, this would lead to a redistribution of wealth and power.
Highlights
Animal and human societies are organised in multiple layers and clusters with ingrained socioeconomic classes bearing inequalities that have been the target of interest of scholars for decades (Landtman, 1934)
The discipline of economics has historically looked at the effects of income distribution on overall economic growth, essentially taking the position that while a more equal distribution of income might benefit society, any policy efforts to promote redistribution do exact an overall cost (e.g. Benabou, 2000)
We could ascertain that the behavioural and monetary differences we eventually found were principally due to the effect of socioeconomic segregation
Summary
Animal and human societies are organised in multiple layers and clusters with ingrained socioeconomic classes bearing inequalities that have been the target of interest of scholars for decades (Landtman, 1934). We are aware that the individuals’ unequal resource holdings affect, (unwittingly, Hauser et al, 2019) the willingness to cooperate at a given time (in empirically tested subjects, which holds true in nature: Burton-Chellew et al, 2013; Cronin et al, 2015; Frank, 1996, 2010; Gavrilets and Fortunato, 2014; Herrmann et al, 2019; Pansini, 2011; Suchak et al, 2016; with different states’ economic systems: Acemoglu et al, 2017; in international joint ventures: Inkpen and Beamish, 1997) These inequalities affect future expectations in iterated exchange (Zeng et al, 2019). When inter-hierarchical exchanges occur, the exercise of power alters the initial, hypothetical centrality of the game, with an eventual shift of the strategies of the players towards disjoint interests (Barker et al, 2015; Campennì and Schino, 2016; Cox et al, 2013; Herbst et al, 2017; Phillips, 2017; Wang et al, 2010) and, eventually, a decreased drive to engage into any deal
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