Topic: Cooperation

Quotes

Christine Korsgaard, Creating a Kingdom of Ends (1996)

• The primal scene of morality . . . is not one in which I do something to you or you do something to me, but one in which we do something together.#Quoted in Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009)

Jon Elster, “Rationality and the Emotions” (1999)

• A person who treated his shame as a cost would in all likelihood never feel any.#

Leda Cosmides, ” Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics, and the Law” (2006)

• Sufficiently large collective actions decouple reward from effort, initiating a process of declining effort by some, which stimulates matching withdrawal by others. This free riding and the dwindling participation it engenders intensify punitive sentiments toward undercontributors, culminating in social systems organized around coercion and punishment (where rulers can deploy it) or culminating in dissolution (where they cannot).#
• From the point of view of an individual involved in one project, others with diverging projects (and different views and values) appear to be free riders with respect to one’s favored enterprises.#

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009)

• Enforcing norms is an act of altruism, as the whole group benefits from my attempts to make the transgressor shape up.#
• Advertising my eye direction for all to see could only have evolved in a cooperative social environment in which others were not likely to exploit it to my detriment.#
• Imitation and conformity can create high degrees of intra-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity, and on a faster time scale than that of biological evolution.#
• Children soon learn to lie also, but that comes only some years later and presupposes preexisting cooperation and trust. If people did not have a tendency to trust one another’s helpfulness, lying could never get off the ground.#

Sam Bowles, A Cooperative Species (2011)

• Punishing free-riders is itself a public good, and is no different from contributing to the public good itself; both confer benefits on others at a cost to oneself. . . . [Nevertheless] experimental subjects decline to contribute altruistically but once punishment is permitted they avidly engage in the altruistic activity of punishing low contributors.#
• An altruistic allele cannot proliferate if its bearers are no more likely to receive help from those with whom they interact than would occur by chance. All successful models of the evolution of altruistic behaviors share this positive assortment feature, including not only those stressing preferential interaction among siblings or other close genetic family members but also models of group competition for reproductive success.#
• In light of these results [that humans have prosocial preferences], the evidence that the tragedy of the commons is sometimes averted and that collective action is a motor of human history is considerably less puzzling. The puzzle, instead, is how humans came to be like this.#
• Institutions affect the rewards and penalties associated with particular behaviors, often favoring the adoption of cooperative actions over others, so that even the self-regarding are often induced to act in the interest of the group.#
• The economic theory of cooperation based on repeated games proves the existence of equilibria with socially desirable properties, while leaving the question of how such equilibria are achieved as an afterthought.#
• Because altruists receive lower payoffs than other group members, they benefit from reproductive leveling because this attenuates the within-group selective pressures working against them.#
• Together, a predisposition to cooperate and a willingness to punish defectors is what we have termed strong reciprocity, and it is the combination of the two that is essential to the large-scale cooperation exhibited by our species.#
• Consistent with the “strength in numbers” and “divide and rule” maxims, punishment is characterized by increasing returns to scale, so the total cost of punishing a particular target declines as the number of punishers increases.#
• A norm of truth-telling developed pari passu with the punishment of free-riders. . . . We do not believe effective collective punishment could have evolved in the absence of a system of information-sharing in which truth-telling was rewarded and lying punished.#
• With a short time horizon (10 periods) punishment promotes cooperation but lowers average payoffs, whereas with a long time horizon (50 periods) punishment increases the level of cooperation and average earnings.#
• While cooperation is common in many species, Homo sapiens is exceptional in that in humans cooperation extends beyond close genealogical kin to include even total strangers, and occurs on a much larger scale than other species except for the social insects.#
• These models [of altruism as “enlightened self-interest”] fail to explain two facts about human cooperation: that it takes place in groups far larger than the immediate family, and that both in real life and in laboratory experiments, it occurs in interactions that are unlikely to be repeated, and where it is impossible to obtain reputational gains from cooperating.#
• Boundary-maintenance supported within-group cooperation and exchange by limiting group size and within-group linguistic, normative and other forms of heterogeneity . . . and we were able to construct social institutions that minimized the disadvantages of those with social preferences in competition with fellow group members, while heightening the group-level advantages associated with the high levels of cooperation that these social preferences allowed.#
• While in some interactions, the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma or public goods game, for example, one can denote strategies as either altruistic or not independently of the distribution of behaviors in a population, this is not generally the case.#
• There is little evidence of reciprocal altruism in non-human animals. . . . A major impediment is that reciprocal altruism requires that animals act as if future payoffs are not greatly discounted. But non-human animals are extraordinarily impatient.#
• [A public goods] game supports cooperative outcomes only if the group is small, the returns to cooperation are high, the behavior of each group member is known with a high degree of accuracy by all of the other group members, errors in execution are infrequent, and group members are very patient and interactions typically endure for many periods. The reason for the ineffectiveness of reciprocal altruism for groups with several members is simple. In groups of two, a free-rider cannot go undetected because a player’s payoff reveals the other player’s behavior. Equally important, when one member defects in order to punish a Defector, the punishment is uniquely targeted on the Defector. But, in groups larger than two, a player cannot infer who has defected from the knowledge of his own payoff. Moreover, a retaliatory defection punishes not only the initial defector, but also all other members of the group. Moreover, other group members may not have observed the initial defection and hence may think that a retaliatory defection is a free-riding defection, inviting further retaliatory defections.#
• Because the truth-telling that is necessary to convert private to public information cannot be expected in the absence of social preferences and because public information is essential to the empirical plausibility of both the simple reciprocal altruism model and its indirect reciprocity variant, [reputation] models do not provide adequate explanations of cooperation among amoral and self-regarding individuals.#
• A signaling equilibrium, however, does not require that the signal confer benefits on other group members. Antisocial behaviors could perform the same function: beating up one’s neighbor can demonstrate physical prowess just as convincingly as bravely defending one’s group. If signaling is to be an explanation of group-beneficial behavior, we must explain why group-beneficial signaling is favored over antisocial signaling. . . . Group competition provides a reason why the signaling that we observe tends to be group beneficial, while signaling theory provides a reason why signaling of any kind may be evolutionarily stable in a within-group dynamic.#
• Even presupposing extraordinary cognitive capacities and levels of patience among the cooperating individuals, there is no reason to believe that a group of more than two individuals would ever discover the cooperative Nash equilibria that the [Folk Theorem] models have identified, and if it were to hit on one, its members would almost certainly abandon it in short order.#
• The self-interest axiom explains neither the frequency nor the effectiveness of punishment.#
• The repetition of the interaction (which happens with probability δ) is analogous to genetic relatedness as a support for cooperative behaviors.#

Yuval Harari, Sapiens (2014)

• People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.#
• Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.#