Cooperation and Conflict

The concurrent evolution of cooperation and the population structures that support it

by Simon Powers

"published in Evolution", "2011", "Co-authored with Alexandra S. Penn and Richard A. Watson"

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly... more The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits that affect their population structure to some degree. These traits, such as a group size preference, affect the relatedness of interacting individuals and hence the opportunity for kin or group selection. We argue that models that do not explicitly consider their evolution cannot provide a satisfactory account of the origin of cooperation, because they cannot explain how the prerequisite population structures arise. Here, we consider the concurrent evolution of genetic traits that affect population structure, with those that affect social behavior. We show that not only does population structure drive social evolution, as in previous models, but that the opportunity for cooperation can in turn drive the creation of population structures that support it. This occurs through the generation of linkage disequilibrium between socio-behavioral and population-structuring traits, such that direct kin selection on social behavior creates indirect selection pressure on population structure. We illustrate our argument with a model of the concurrent evolution of group size preference and social behavior.

Optimal distinctiveness theory in nested categorization contexts: Moving from dueling identities to a dual identity

by Geoffrey Leonardelli

Leonardelli, G. J., Pickett, C.L., Joseph, J.E., & Hess, Y.D. (2011). Optimal distinctiveness theory in nested categorization contexts: Moving from dueling identities to a dual identity. To appear in R.M. Kramer, G.J. Leonardelli, & R.W. Livingston (Eds.), Social Cognition, Social Identity, and Intergroup Relations: A Festschrift in Honor of Marilynn Brewer (pp. 103-125). Psychology Press Festschrift series. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Leonardelli, Pickett, and Hess, integrates Brewer’s (1991) optimal distinctiveness theory with the nested categorical... more Leonardelli, Pickett, and Hess, integrates Brewer’s (1991) optimal distinctiveness theory with the nested categorical context typically descriptive of an organization’s internal structure, where individuals belong to groups (subgroups) nested within more inclusive superordinate groups (such as functional units nested within an organization). It is ideal for employees to simultaneously identify with the subgroup and superordinate group, that is, to engage what is called a “dual identity,” as doing so aligns the loyalty and the interests of subgroup members with the superordinate group as a whole. However, the presenters first review evidence that individuals identify more with the subgroup and less with the superordinate group, what the presenters call “dueling identities,” because individuals prefer the more distinctive subgroups to superordinate groups. The presenters then argue that such dueling identities can be transformed into a dual identity were the subgroup and superordinate group both perceived to be optimally distinct. Some evidence is presented that supports this conclusion and the discussion highlights the different strategies that could be implemented to engineer a dual identity by manipulating individuals’ needs for optimal distinctiveness.

Aging and Wisdom: Culture Matters

by Igor Grossmann

Co-authored with Karasawa, M., Izumi, S., Na, J., Varnum, M. E. W., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E., published in 'Psychological Science', in press

Research indicates that cultures differ in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated... more Research indicates that cultures differ in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans. Such cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. We interviewed random samples of Americans from the Midwest in the U.S. and Japanese from the larger Tokyo area about the future developments of intergroup and interpersonal conflicts. Responses showed increased wisdom (e.g. recognition of multiple perspectives, compromise, and the limits of knowledge) with increasing age among Americans, but older age was not associated with wiser responses among Japanese. Younger and middle-aged Japanese showed greater use of wise reasoning strategies than younger and middle-aged Americans. This cultural difference was weaker for older participants for interpersonal conflicts and was actually reversed for intergroup conflicts. Implications of this research for the study of aging, cultural psychology, and wisdom are discussed.

The Role of Intention Recognition in the Evolution of Cooperative Behavior

by The Anh Han

co-authored with LM Pereira and FC Santos, IJCAI 2011.

Given its ubiquity, scale and complexity, few problems have created the combined interest of so many unrelated areas... more Given its ubiquity, scale and complexity, few problems have created the combined interest of so many unrelated areas as the evolution of cooperation. Using the tools of evolutionary game theory, here we address, for the first time, the role played by intention recognition in the final outcome of cooperation in large populations of self-regarding individuals. By equipping individuals with the capacity of assessing intentions of others in the course of repeated Prisoner's Dilemma interactions, we show how intention recognition opens a window of opportunity for cooperation to thrive, as it precludes the invasion of pure cooperators by random drift while remaining robust against defective strategies. Intention recognizers are able to assign an intention to the action of their opponents based on an acquired corpus of possible intentions. We show how intention recognizers can prevail against most famous strategies of repeated dilemmas of cooperation, even in the presence of errors. Our approach invites the adoption of other classification and pattern recognition mechanisms common among Humans, to unveil the evolution of complex cognitive processes in the context of social dilemmas.

Intention recognition promotes the emergence of cooperation

by The Anh Han

co-authored with LM Pereira and FC Santos, Adaptive Behavior, 2011

Few problems have created the combined interest of so many unrelated areas as the evolution of cooperation. As a... more Few problems have created the combined interest of so many unrelated areas as the evolution of cooperation. As a result, several mechanisms have been identified to work as catalyzers of cooperative behavior. Yet, these studies, mostly grounded on evolutionary dynamics and game theory, have neglected the important role played by intention recognition in behavioral evolution. Here we address explicitly this issue, characterizing the dynamics emerging from a population of intention recognizers. We derive a Bayesian Network model for intention recognition in the context of repeated social dilemmas and evolutionary game theory, by assessing the internal dynamics of trust between intention recognizers and their opponents. Intention recognizers are then able to predict the next move of their opponents based on past direct interactions, which, in turn, enables them to prevail over the most famous strategies of repeated dilemmas of cooperation,
even in presence of noise. Overall, our framework offers new insights on the complexity and beauty of behavioral evolution driven by elementary forms of cognition.

Intention Recognition, Commitment, and The Evolution of Cooperation.

by The Anh Han

Co-authored with L. M. Pereira and F. C. Santos.
In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2012), IEEE Press, Brisbane, Australia.

Individuals make commitments towards others in order to influence others to behave in certain ways. Most commitments... more Individuals make commitments towards others in order to influence others to behave in certain ways. Most commitments may depend on some incentive that is required to ensure that the action is in the agent's best interest and thus, should be carried out to avoid eventual penalties. Similarly, individuals may ground their decision on an accurate assessment of the intentions of others. Hence, both commitments and intention recognition go side by side in behavioral evolution. Here, we analyze the role played by the co-evolution of intention recognition plus the emergence of commitments, in the framework of the evolution of cooperative behavior. We resort to tools of evolutionary game theory in finite populations, showing how the combination of these two aspects of human behavior can enhance the emergent fraction of cooperative acts under a broad spectrum of configurations.

Of virtual victims and victimized virtues: differential effects of experienced aggression in video games on social cooperation

by Tobias Rothmund

Rothmund, T., Gollwitzer, M. & Klimmt, C. (2011).
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(1), 107-119.

In two experimental studies we investigated how interacting with aggressive virtual characters in video games affects... more In two experimental studies we investigated how interacting with aggressive virtual characters in video games affects trust and cooperation of players. Study 1 demonstrates that experiencing virtual aggression from a victim’s perspective can impair players’ investments in a subsequent common goods dilemma situation. This effect is mediated by reduced expectations of trust in the cooperativeness of interaction partners. In Study 2 the same effect was replicated by using a different cooperation task and by investigating the moderating role of justice sensitivity from a victim’s perspective as a dispositional factor. Participants transferred less money to an unknown partner in a trust game after the exposure to aggressive non player characters in a video game. This effect was stronger for people high in victim sensitivity. Results of both studies can be interpreted in line with the sensitivity to mean intentions model and add to the body of research on violent media effects.

Punishment and cooperation in nature

by Nichola Raihani

Let's Work it Out (or We'll See You in Court): Litigation and Private Dispute Resolution in Vertical Exchange Relationships

by Fabrice Lumineau

Lumineau F. & Oxley J. 2012. “Let’s Work It Out (Or We’ll See You in Court): Litigation and Private Dispute Resolution in Vertical Exchange Relationships.” Organization Science, Forthcoming.

We examine how partners in vertical exchange relationships actually resolve disputes that are sufficiently serious to... more We examine how partners in vertical exchange relationships actually resolve disputes that are sufficiently serious to get lawyers involved. Reaching beyond the usual domain of organizational and management research, we leverage findings from law and economics to offer a novel organizational perspective on litigation and private dispute resolution, and we develop hypotheses about the likelihood of litigation in different exchange settings. Our empirical analysis generates three sets of new findings: First, counter to the received wisdom, we see that the involvement of lawyers does not necessarily signal the bitter end of an exchange relationship, because firms frequently manage to avoid litigation and resolve their disputes privately, and they do so in a manner that accords with our theoretical predictions. Second, we see that familiarity with exchange partners does not automatically lead to increased willingness to work things out; rather, our empirical results suggest that the impact of exchange duration on parties’ willingness to resolve disputes privately is contingent on the development of norms of cooperation: in the event that such norms do not develop, the probability of a litigated outcome actually increases over time. Finally, we see that firms’ willingness to work things out privately is also influenced positively by the shadow of the future. These findings are suggestive of a “discriminating alignment” between exchange characteristics and the choice of dispute resolution procedure, and they thus inject important new evidence into ongoing discussions about the legal underpinnings of different governance forms.

The Centered Self

by J. David Velleman

Originally published in Self to Self (2006)

On being "grounded" or "centered", and its relation to trustworthiness. On being "grounded" or "centered", and its relation to trustworthiness.

Social norms and game theory: harmony or discord?

by Cédric Paternotte

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.
Co-authored with Jonathan Grose.

Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share... more Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share some common vocabulary and methods. We describe three major approaches of this kind (due to Binmore, Bicchieri and Gintis), before comparing them systematically on five crucial themes: generality of the solution, preference transformation, punishment, epistemic conditions and type of explanation. This allows us to show that these theories are, by and large, less compatible than they seem. We then argue that those three theories struggle to account for three phenomena pertaining to social norms (namely context-dependence, conflicting norms and self-evidence), with which any complete game-theoretic account should in principle be able to deal.

The Social and the psychological: Structure and Context in Intellectual Development

by Charis Psaltis

Psaltis, C., Duveen, G., and Perret-Clermont, A. (2009) in Human Development, 52, 291-312

This paper discusses the distinct meanings of internalization and interiorization as ways of rendering intelligible... more This paper discusses the distinct meanings of internalization and interiorization as ways of rendering intelligible the social constitution of the psychological in a line of research that started with Piaget and extended into a post-Piagetian reformulation of intelligence in successive generations of studies of the relations between social interaction and cognitive development. While the same clarity cannot be found in Vygotsky’s work, the emphasis on the cultural embeddedness of cognitive activity in contemporary cultural psychology has also been a significant influence on the evolution of this work. This paper proposes a further integration of these perspectives by developing the idea of operativity-in-context as a means of retaining the advantages of Piaget’s structural analysis of cognition whilst recognizing the situational and cultural constraints on cognitive functioning.

Communication and the construction of knowledge or transmission of belief: The role of conversation type and behavioral style

by Charis Psaltis

Psaltis, C. (2005). Communication and the construction of knowledge or transmission of belief:  The role of conversation type and behavioral style. Studies in Communication Sciences, 5, 209-228.

In this paper it is proposed that a central topic of inquiry in the study of social knowledge should be the... more In this paper it is proposed that a central topic of inquiry in the study of social knowledge should be the clarification of the conditions of communication that are likely to lead to the attainment of knowledge rather than to the transmission of belief. Insights and empirical evidence from social developmental psychology are presented that shed light on this issue. It is argued that social relations established between the partners in communication in the form of different conversation types are differentially linked to representations of an object based on the construction of new knowledge or transmission of beliefs. A central mechanism that constrains or enables the establishment of particular conversation types is social recognition, as this is manifested in different behavioural styles in communication.

Male cleaner wrasses adjust punishment of female partners according to the stakes

by Nichola Raihani

Sex Differences in Cooperation: A Meta-analytic Review of Social Dilemmas

by Daniel Balliet

Balliet, D., Li, N. P., Macfarlan, S. J., & Van Vugt, M. (in press). Sex differences in cooperation: A meta-analysis of social dilemmas. Psychological Bulletin.

Although it is commonly believed that women are kinder and more cooperative than men, there is conflicting evidence... more Although it is commonly believed that women are kinder and more cooperative than men, there is conflicting evidence for this assertion. Current theories of sex differences in social behavior suggest that it may be useful to examine in what situations men and women are likely to differ in cooperation. Here we derive predictions from both sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives on context-specific sex differences in cooperation and conduct a unique meta-analytic study of 272 effect sizes -- sampled across 50 years of research -- on social dilemmas to examine several potential moderators. The overall average effect size is not statistically different from zero (d = -.05), suggesting that men and women do not differ in their overall amounts of cooperation. However, the association between sex and cooperation is moderated by several key features of the social context: Male-male interactions are more cooperative than female-female interactions (d = .16) yet women cooperate more than men in mixed-sex interactions (d = -.22). In repeated interactions men are more cooperative than women. Women were more cooperative than men in larger groups and in more recent studies, but these differences dissappeared after statistically controlling for several study characteristics. We discuss these results in the context of both sociocultural and evolutionary theories of sex differences, stress the need for an integrated biosocial approach, and outline directions for future research.

Rational Voluntarism and the Charitable Sector

by Bruce Chapman

Book review: Grillo, Eric (Ed.) (2005). Power without Domination. Dialogism and the Empowering Property of Communication

by Alon Lischinsky

Journal of Language and Politics 9:1 (2010), 167–171

Voluntary contribution to public-goods in mutual-help forums: reciprocity or group attachment?

by Giangiacomo Bravo

Socio-Economic Review, 8(4), 709-733 (2010).

This paper studies the provision of public goods in open-source software support forums. Data from the Italian TeX... more This paper studies the provision of public goods in open-source software support forums. Data from the Italian TeX Users Group were analysed to find individual motives for offering help. Using this methodology, we were able to split the forum participants into a small intrinsically motivated core group and a much larger group motivated mainly on the basis of reciprocity. The motives of the two groups were largely complementary and jointly produced a situation where the overwhelming majority of questions received an appropriate answer. At the same time, the core group played a fundamental role and was the key in explaining the forum's success. Without this group, the forum's performance would have been considerably diminished, probably down to a level that would not justify its existence.

Trust, Information Acquisition and Financial Decisions: A Field Experiment

by Alexander Elbittar

Forthcomming in Economía Mexicana, (2012) Vol. XXI: Iss. 2, México.

We study the relationship between information acquisition and trust in financial decision making. A field experiment... more We study the relationship between information acquisition and trust in financial decision making. A field experiment with a variation of the trust game was conducted with the partners of a financial cooperative located in a Mexican rural area. Individuals who frequently visit friends are more trustful, those who visit their families regularly reciprocate less, and active cooperative partners reciprocate more. Individuals show interest in acquiring information on the financial status and participation in social networks of other people with whom they may establish financial transactions. However, information does not appear to affect transfers; trust seems to overshadow information acquisition in financial decision making.

Reassessing Male Aggression and Dominance: The Evidence From Primatology

by Katherine C. MacKinnon

Co-authored with Agustin Fuentes.  http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&isbn=9780226500249

Ideas about nonhuman primates have long been used to talk about human gender and aggression.  Due to phylogenetic... more Ideas about nonhuman primates have long been used to talk about human gender and aggression.  Due to phylogenetic relatedness and popular conceptions of similarities, behavioral studies of nonhuman primates have a much greater impact on ideas about human behavior than studies of other groups of organisms.  Because of our biological basis for shared traits resulting from a common evolutionary heritage, nonhuman primate behavior is often put forward as evidence of an underlying natural condition or of normative roles in human behavior. In recent years, the evidence for the diversity and complexity of nonhuman primate behavior has complicated the process of generalizing from primate to human behavior.  Yet, at the same time, certain reductionist accounts--stemming primarily from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology--have have found their way into popularized narratives that rely on analogies between primate and human behavior that have little basis in the evidence of primatology.  This chapter focuses on the tension between these two trends in the uses of primatology, particularly as they relate to discussions of male aggression and male dominance.