Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we develop an evolutionary game-theoretic model based on research in cultural psychology that shows that humans in various cultures differ in their tendencies to conform with those around them. Using this model, we analyze the evolutionary relationships between the tendency to conform and how quickly a population reacts when conditions make a change in norm desirable. Our analysis identifies conditions when a tipping point is reached in a population, causing norms to change rapidly.
Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) was initially proposed to model biological evolution @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_36 , but has been increasingly used to study human cultural evolution. The idea is to represent an interaction among individuals as a normal-form game, where individuals can use different strategies. The game's payoffs represent an individual's evolutionary fitness. In EGT models of cultural evolution, biological reproduction represents : individuals are more likely to adopt strategies from others that produce high fitness and thus strategies that lead to higher fitness become more prevalent over time. While such models use highly simplified abstractions of complex human interactions, they aim to capture the essential nature of the interactions of interest, and thus have been increasingly used to study a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena, (see @cite_15 for a brief tutorial on how such models are generally set up) such as, cooperation and altruism @cite_33 @cite_20 @cite_35 @cite_10 @cite_22 , punishment @cite_42 @cite_23 @cite_41 @cite_39 @cite_11 , trust and reputation @cite_2 @cite_3 @cite_29 , ethnocentrism @cite_5 @cite_30 @cite_12 , etc.
@cite_30 @cite_35 @cite_22 @cite_36 @cite_41 @cite_29 @cite_42 @cite_3 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_21 @cite_39 @cite_23 @cite_12 @cite_33 @cite_1 @cite_11
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Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such “altruistic punishment” may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups. Thus, applying such models to the evolution of altruistic punishment leads to the prediction that people will not incur costs to punish others to provide benefits to large groups of nonrelatives. However, here we show that an important asymmetry between altruistic cooperation and altruistic punishment allows altruistic punishment to evolve in populations engaged in one-time, anonymous interactions. This process allows both altruistic punishment and altruistic cooperation to be maintained even when groups are large and other parameter values approximate conditions that characterize cultural evolution in the small-scale societies in which humans lived for most of our prehistory. We study the emergence of trust behavior at both the individual and the population levels. At the individual level, in contrast to prior research that views trust as fixed traits, we model the emergence of trust or cooperation as a result of trial and error learning by a computer algorithm borrowed from the field of artificial intelligence (Watkins 1989). We show that trust can indeed arise as a result of trial and error learning. Emergence of trust at the population level is modeled by a grid-world consisting of cells of individual agents, a technique known as spatialization in evolutionary game theory. We show that, under a wide range of assumptions, trusting individuals tend to take over the population and trust becomes a systematic property. At both individual and population levels, therefore, we argue that trust behaviors will often emerge as a result of learning. The Inevitability of Ethnocentrism Revisited: Ethnocentrism Diminishes As Mobility Increases We discuss how to use evolutionary game theory (EGT) as a framework for studying how cultural dynamics and structural properties can influence the evolution of norms and behaviors within a society. We provide a brief tutorial on how EGT works, and discuss what kinds of insights it can provide. We then describe three published studies in which we have developed EGT models that help explain how structural and external conditions in a society affect the emergence of social norms. This text introduces current evolutionary game theory--where ideas from evolutionary biology and rationalistic economics meet--emphasizing the links between static and dynamic approaches and noncooperative game theory. The author provides an overview of the developments that have taken place in this branch of game theory, discusses the mathematical tools needed to understand the area, describes both the motivation and intuition for the concepts involved, and explains why and how the theory is relevant to economics. How do human groups maintain a high level of cooperation despite a low level of genetic relatedness among group members? We suggest that many humans have a predisposition to punish those who violate group-beneficial norms, even when this imposes a fitness cost on the punisher. Such altruistic punishment is widely observed to sustain high levels of cooperation in behavioral experiments and in natural settings. We offer a model of cooperation and punishment that we call strong reciprocity: where members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, strong reciprocators obey the norm and punish its violators, even though as a result they receive lower payoffs than other group members, such as selfish agents who violate the norm and do not punish, and pure cooperators who adhere to the norm but free-ride by never punishing. Our agent-based simulations show that, under assumptions approximating likely human environments over the 100,000 years prior to the domestication of animals and plants, the proliferation of strong reciprocators when initially rare is highly likely, and that substantial frequencies of all three behavioral types can be sustained in a population. As a result, high levels of cooperation are sustained. Our results do not require that group members be related or that group extinctions occur.