Evolution Of Human Cooperation Research Articles

Can episodic memory deter cheating and promote altruism?

Episodic memory gives us the ability to mentally travel back in time to revisit and relive past experiences. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the function of episodic memory. According to the orthodox view, episodic memory should be considered a part of a constructive system that simulates the future for sophisticated foresight and flexible planning. In this paper, I offer a novel alternative view. I argue that episodic memory provides invaluable information about the past behavior of others, allowing us to identify reliable and trustworthy partners while avoiding dealing with cheaters. Theoretical models demonstrate that cooperation in groups can be maintained if potential partners use information about an individual’s past behavior to guide their behavior toward that individual. In these reputation-based models of human cooperation, individuals with a history of cheating are ostracized, whereas those with a history of cooperative behavior flourish. Against this theoretical background, it is possible to see a function of episodic memory in facilitating information exchange about others, helping group members make effective partner choices, and avoiding the risk of interacting with cheaters. If correct, episodic memory may have played a significant role in the evolution of human cooperation.

Can Humans Cooperate to Create a Sustainable Future?

Abstract: In response to calls for a “cultural transformation” that aims to bring about a sustainable relationship with nature, this review considers the evolution of human cooperation and its implications for cultural change. The link between cooperation and culture has varied throughout human evolution. The hierarchical ranking of a primate ancestor changed in species of Homo when they adopted egalitarian social arrangements, a stage that persisted for hundreds of thousands of years before returning once more to hierarchy. With the maintenance of social status in contemporary societies seeming to depend heavily on patterns of consumption, it is argued that the ultimate success of a change toward sustainability will depend on new systems of economic management and social incentivization.

Punishment in the public goods game is evaluated negatively irrespective of non-cooperators' motivation.

The evolution of human cooperation toward strangers remains puzzling. While the punishment of non-cooperators is a possible explanation, whether punishments can help cooperation evolve depends on how people evaluate punishers. Thus, it is of vital importance to elucidate the perception of punishers. Previous studies have found that punishment is evaluated differently in different contexts; punishers are negatively and positively evaluated in the public goods game with punishment (PGG-P) and in the third-party punishment game (TPP), respectively. To disentangle the mixed evidence, our research focused on motivations for non-cooperation and examined whether different motivations for non-cooperation could explain the inconsistent findings. We hypothesized that people positively evaluate punishers when they punish those who non-cooperated to exploit others (greed), e.g., in a TPP situation. Contrastingly, people negatively evaluate punishers when they punish those who non-cooperated to avoid exploitation (fear), e.g., in a PGG-P situation. If so, in either game, punishers would be evaluated positively in situations where greed dominates, and negatively in situations where fear dominates the non-cooperation motivation. To test this, we conducted two online experiments with hypothetical scenarios in which the decision-making order was used to manipulate the motivations of non-cooperators. The results of Study 1 (N = 240) using only PGG-P and Study 2 (N = 602) using both PGG-P and TPP showed that the non-cooperation motivation did not have a significant effect on the evaluations of punishers and non-punishers. Punishers (vs non-punishers) were evaluated negatively in PGG-P and positively in TPP regardless of the decision-making order of non-cooperation. We discussed the role of higher-order information in the evaluation of punishment.

Strengths of social ties modulate brain computations for third-party punishment

Costly punishment of social norm transgressors by third-parties has been considered as a decisive stage in the evolution of human cooperation. An important facet of social relationship knowledge concerns the strength of the social ties between individuals, as measured by social distance. Yet, it is unclear how the enforcement of social norms is influenced by the social distance between a third-party and a norm violator at the behavioral and the brain system levels. Here, we investigated how social distance between punishers and norm-violators influences third-party punishment. Participants as third-party punished norm violators more severely as social distance between them increased. Using model-based fMRI, we disentangled key computations contributing to third-party punishment: inequity aversion, social distance between participant and norm violator and integration of the cost to punish with these signals. Inequity aversion increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula, and processing social distance engaged a bilateral fronto-parietal cortex brain network. These two brain signals and the cost to punish were integrated in a subjective value signal of sanctions that modulated activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Together, our results reveal the neurocomputational underpinnings of third-party punishment and how social distance modulates enforcement of social norms in humans.

Social disappointment and partner presence affect long-tailed macaque refusal behaviour in an 'inequity aversion' experiment.

Protest in response to unequal reward distribution is thought to have played a central role in the evolution of human cooperation. Some animals refuse food and become demotivated when rewarded more poorly than a conspecific, and this has been taken as evidence that non-human animals, like humans, protest in the face of inequity. An alternative explanation-social disappointment-shifts the cause of this discontent away from the unequal reward, to the human experimenter who could-but elects not to-treat the subject well. This study investigates whether social disappointment could explain frustration behaviour in long-tailed macaques, Macaca fascicularis. We tested 12 monkeys in a novel 'inequity aversion' paradigm. Subjects had to pull a lever and were rewarded with low-value food; in half of the trials, a partner worked alongside the subjects receiving high-value food. Rewards were distributed either by a human or a machine. In line with the social disappointment hypothesis, monkeys rewarded by the human refused food more often than monkeys rewarded by the machine. Our study extends previous findings in chimpanzees and suggests that social disappointment plus social facilitation or food competition effects drive food refusal patterns.

Social Kropotkinism: The Best ‘New Normal’ for Survival in the Post COVID-19, Climate Emergency World?

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was originally an evolutionary biologist, writing shortly after Charles Darwin, who pointed to collaboration rather than competition as the underlying driver of (human) evolution, development and survival. This paper questions why ‘Social Darwinism’ has entered the language when ‘Social Kropotkinism’ has not. We position Social Kropotkinism – based on mutual support and community cooperation as opposed to Darwinian survival of the fittest – as having value as a new societal organising principle that can help to ensure social justice and equitable distribution of increasingly scarce resources in the post-pandemic, climate emergency world. We chart the re-emergence of Kropotkin’s ideas of mutualism against the current literature on the evolution of human cooperation, showing how the blossoming of community-level mutual aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed and filled many cracks in UK Government provision of welfare and social care, is the inevitable end-result of the empathy and predisposition for cooperation that has underpinned the development of complex societies and civilisation.
 
 Received: 5 August 2022 / Accepted: 13 October 2022 / Published: 5 November 2022

The Effect of Bounded Rationality on Human Cooperation with Voluntary Participation

The evolution of human cooperation is an important issue concerning social science. A deep understanding of human bounded rationality is a prerequisite for promoting collective cooperation and solving social dilemmas. Here we construct an asymmetric micro-dynamic based on bounded rationality from a micro perspective by combining behavioral economics and cognitive psychology with evolutionary game theory. Asynchronously updated Monte Carlo simulations were conducted where individuals were located on a square lattice to play a voluntary public goods game. The results showed that “free riding” behaviors can be effectively suppressed in most situations. The cooperation level can be obviously enhanced in a population comprising easily satisfied cooperators and greedy defectors. Moreover, essential conditions for the stability of the system are further discussed at the microscopic level, and altruistic behavior can be explained that an individual with lower expectations for or underestimation of a single game is more likely to cooperate. We argue that, compared to traditional approaches, the integration of interdisciplinary ideas should be taken more seriously.

Dying to cooperate: the role of environmental harshness in human collaboration.

It has been proposed that environmental stress acted as a selection pressure on the evolution of human cooperation. Through agent-based evolutionary modelling, mathematical analysis, and human experimental data we illuminate the mechanisms by which the environment influences cooperative success and decision making in a Stag Hunt game. The modelling and mathematical results show that only cooperative foraging phenotypes survive the harshest of environments but pay a penalty for miscoordination in favourable environments. When agents are allowed to coordinate their hunting intentions by communicating, cooperative phenotypes outcompete those who pursue individual strategies in almost all environmental and payoff scenarios examined. Data from human participants show flexible decision-making in face of cooperative uncertainty, favouring high-risk, high-reward strategy when environments are harsher and starvation is imminent. Converging lines of evidence from the three approaches indicate a significant role for environmental variability in human cooperative dynamics and the species-unique cognition designed to support it.

Emotion regulation and cooperation

ABSTRACT Classic accounts of the evolution of human cooperation conceive emotions as automatic and uncontrollable impulses toward prosocial behavior. I argue that this view of emotion is incorrect, but that classic accounts of the evolution of human cooperation can benefit from an alternative view. The social and moral emotions are not untamed passions, but carefully cultivated and regulated states, which promote cooperation only if they develop properly in childhood and then are actively managed in adulthood. I argue that part and parcel of the normal development of human emotion is the development of emotion regulation skills, or abilities to intervene on and manage one’s emotions in real time. I then argue that unmanaged emotions – or emotions that evade an individual’s control – tend to discourage cooperation, while managed emotions – or emotions that are brought under control – tend to encourage it. Finally, I argue that the cultivation of emotion regulation skills allows social and moral emotions to continue to promote cooperation, even though the world that many humans inhabit today is radically different from the world in which these emotions first evolved.

The evolution of morality and the role of commitment.

A considerable share of the literature on the evolution of human cooperation considers the question why we have not evolved to play the Nash equilibrium in prisoners' dilemmas or public goods games. In order to understand human morality and pro-social behaviour, we suggest that it would actually be more informative to investigate why we have not evolved to play the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in sequential games, such as the ultimatum game and the trust game. The 'rationally irrational' behaviour that can evolve in such games gives a much better match with actual human behaviour, including elements of morality such as honesty, responsibility and sincerity, as well as the more hostile aspects of human nature, such as anger and vengefulness. The mechanism at work here is commitment, which does not need population structure, nor does it need interactions to be repeated. We argue that this shift in focus can not only help explain why humans have evolved to know wrong from right, but also why other animals, with similar population structures and similar rates of repetition, have not evolved similar moral sentiments. The suggestion that the evolutionary function of morality is to help us commit to otherwise irrational behaviour stems from the work of Robert Frank (American Economic Review, 77(4), 593-604, 1987; Passions within reason: The strategic role of the emotions, WW Norton, 1988), which has played a surprisingly modest role in the scientific debate to date.

Justified defection is neither justified nor unjustified in indirect reciprocity.

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.

Information transfer efficiency differs in wild chimpanzees and bonobos, but not social cognition.

Several theories have been generated to understand the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying the unique cooperative abilities of humans. The ‘interdependence hypothesis' posits first, that the cognitive dimension of human cooperation evolved in contexts when several individuals needed to act together to achieve a common goal, like when hunting large prey. Second, the more interdependent individuals are, the more likely they are to provide services to conspecifics in other contexts. Alternatively, the ‘social tolerance hypothesis' proposes that higher social tolerance allows conspecifics to cooperate more efficiently and with a wider range of partners. We conducted the first field experimental evaluation of both hypotheses in our closest living relatives by contrasting chimpanzees to the less interdependent but more tolerant bonobos. We compared each species' performance during a cooperative task: informing conspecifics about a danger. We presented Gaboon viper models to 82 individuals from five wild communities. Chimpanzees arriving late at the snake were significantly more likely to have heard a call and less likely to startle, indicating that chimpanzees were better informed about the presence of the threat than bonobos. This stems from clear species differences in how individuals adjusted their calling decisions to the level of information already available. Chimpanzees were more likely to call and produced more alarm calls when they had not yet heard a call, whereas bonobos did so when they already heard a call. Our results confirm the link between interdependence and cooperation performance. These species differences were most likely driven by differences in motivation rather than in cognitive capacities because both species tended to consider audience knowledge in their decision to call. Our results inform theories on the evolution of human cooperation by linking inter-group competition pressure and in-group cooperative motivation and/or capability.

The Evolution of Morality

A considerable share of the literature on the evolution of human co- operation considers the question why we have not evolved to play the Nash equilibrium in prisoners' dilemmas or public goods games. In order to un- derstand human morality and pro-social behaviour, we suggest it would actually be more informative to investigate why we have not evolved to play the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in sequential games, such as the ultimatum game and the trust game. The \rationally be- havior that can evolve in such games gives a much better match with actual human behaviour, including elements of morality such as honesty, responsibility, and sincerity, as well as the more hostile aspects of human nature, such as anger and vengefulness. The mechanism at work here is commitment, which does not need population structure, nor does it need interactions to be repeated. We argue that this shift in focus can not only help explain why humans have evolved to know wrong from right, but also why other animals, with similar population structures and similar rates of repetition, have not evolved similar moral sentiments. The suggestion that the evolutionary function of morality is to help us commit to oth- erwise irrational behaviour stems from the work of Robert Frank (1987; 1988), which has played a surprisingly modest role in the scienti c debate to date.

Helping, fast and slow: Exploring intuitive cooperation in early ontogeny

Cooperative behavior is central to human societies. Human adults who reach their cooperative decisions more rapidly and independently of cognitive control display greater levels of prosocial behavior. This is taken to show that cooperation is guided by intuitive processes rather than by active control of selfish impulses. The current study investigated the emergence of intuitive cooperation in early human ontogeny. We measured helping behavior (latency and frequency) in a longitudinal sample of infants at ages 14 and 18 months. Between 14 and 18 months, the frequency of helping significantly increased and latency to help significantly decreased, suggesting advances in helping behavior during this period of development. Moreover, at 18 months and to some extent, even at 14 months, infants who helped more rapidly (as indexed by a shorter latency) acted more prosocially (as indexed by a greater frequency of helping) than infants who were slower to help. This link between latency and frequency of prosocial behavior was independent of infants' ability for inhibitory control and general sociability levels. Prosocial behavior thus begins to be governed by intuitive processes that operate independently of cognitive control early in human ontogeny. This informs our understanding of the nature and emergence of cooperative behavior by supporting accounts that assign a central role to intuition in the evolution of human cooperation.

Book Review of The Evolution of Human Co-operation: Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies, by Charles Stanish

Book Review of The Evolution of Human Co-operation: Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies, by Charles Stanish

The evolution of human cooperation

Darwin viewed cooperation as a perplexing challenge to his theory of natural selection. Natural selection generally favors the evolution of behaviors that enhance the fitness of individuals. Cooperative behavior, which increases the fitness of a recipient at the expense of the donor, contradicts this logic. William D. Hamilton helped to solve the puzzle when he showed that cooperation can evolve if cooperators direct benefits selectively to other cooperators (i.e. assortment). Kinship, group selection and the previous behavior of social partners all provide mechanisms for assortment (Figure 1), and kin selection and reciprocal altruism are the foundation of the kinds of cooperative behavior observed in many animals. Humans also bias cooperation in favor of kin and reciprocating partners, but the scope, scale, and variability of human cooperation greatly exceed that of other animals. Here, we introduce derived features of human cooperation in the context in which they originally evolved, and discuss the processes that may have shaped the evolution of our remarkable capacity for cooperation. We argue that culturally-evolved norms that specify how people should behave provide an evolutionarily novel mechanism for assortment, and play an important role in sustaining derived properties of cooperation in human groups.

A solution for private assessment in indirect reciprocity using solitary observation

Although indirect reciprocity is a fundamental mechanism in the evolution of human cooperation, most studies assume public assessment in which individuals are not permitted to obtain private assessments of others. Existing studies on private assessment have used individual-based simulations because of the analytical difficulty involved. Here, we develop an analytical method using solitary observation to solve private assessment in indirect reciprocity problem without any approximation. In this study, we formulate a model of solitary observation and calculate the replicator dynamics systems of five leading norms of indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity in private assessment provides a different result to that in public assessment. According to the existence proofs of cooperative evolutionarily stable (CES) points in the system, strict norms (stern judging and shunning) have no CES point in private assessment, while they do in public assessment. Image scoring does not change the system regardless of the assessment types because it does not use second-order information. In tolerant norms (simple standing and staying), the CES points move to co-existence of norms and unconditional cooperators. Despite the fact that there is no central coercive assessment system in private assessment, the average cooperation rate at the CES points in private assessment is greater than that in public assessment. This is because private assessment gives unconditional cooperators a role. Our results also show the superiority of the staying norm. Compared with simple standing, staying has three advantages in private assessment: a higher cooperation rate, easiness of invasion into defectors, and robustness to maintain cooperative evolutionarily stable situations. Our results are applicable to general social dilemmas in relation to private information. Under some dilemmas, norms or assessment rules should be carefully chosen to enable cooperation to evolve.

The difference between ice cream and Nazis: Moral externalization and the evolution of human cooperation.

A range of empirical findings is first used to more precisely characterize our distinctive tendency to objectify or externalize moral demands and obligations, and it is then argued that this salient feature of our moral cognition represents a profound puzzle for evolutionary approaches to human moral psychology that existing proposals do not help resolve. It is then proposed that such externalization facilitated a broader shift to a vastly more cooperative form of social life by establishing and maintaining a connection between the extent to which an agent is herself motivated by a given moral norm and the extent to which she uses conformity to that same norm as a criterion in evaluating candidate partners in social interaction generally. This connection ensures the correlated interaction necessary to protect those prepared to adopt increasingly cooperative, altruistic, and other prosocial norms of interaction from exploitation, especially as such norms were applied in novel ways and/or to novel circumstances and as the rapid establishment of new norms allowed us to reap still greater rewards from hypercooperation. A wide range of empirical findings is then used to support this hypothesis, showing why the status we ascribe to moral demands and considerations exhibits the otherwise puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements that it does, as well as showing how the need to effectively advertise our externalization of particular moral commitments generates features of our social interaction so familiar that they rarely strike us as standing in need of any explanation in the first place.

True altruism seen in chimpanzees, giving clues to evolution of human cooperation

True altruism seen in chimpanzees, giving clues to evolution of human cooperation

The Role of Ontogeny in the Evolution of Human Cooperation

To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al. (2012, in Current Anthropology 53(6):673–92) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The key adaptive context in this account was the obligate collaborative foraging of early human adults. Hawkes (2014, in Human Nature 25(1):28–48), following Hrdy (Mothers and Others, Harvard University Press, 2009), provided an alternative account for the emergence of uniquely human cooperative skills in which the key was early human infants’ attempts to solicit care and attention from adults in a cooperative breeding context. Here we attempt to reconcile these two accounts. Our composite account accepts Hrdy’s and Hawkes’s contention that the extremely early emergence of human infants’ cooperative skills suggests an important role for cooperative breeding as adaptive context, perhaps in early Homo. But our account also insists that human cooperation goes well beyond these nascent skills to include such things as the communicative and cultural conventions, norms, and institutions created by later Homo and early modern humans to deal with adult problems of social coordination. As part of this account we hypothesize how each of the main stages of human ontogeny (infancy, childhood, adolescence) was transformed during evolution both by infants’ cooperative skills “migrating up” in age and by adults’ cooperative skills “migrating down” in age.