John Orbell

Selfishness examined: Cooperation in the absence of egoistic incentives

Social dilemmas occur when the pursuit of self-interest by individuals in a group leads to less than optimal collective outcomes for everyone in the group. A critical assumption in the human sciences is that peoples choices in such dilemmas are individualistic, selfish, and rational. Hence, cooperation in the support of group welfare will only occur if there are selfish incentives that convert the social dilemma into a nondilemma. In recent years, inclusive fitness theories have lent weight to such traditional views of rational selfishness on Darwinian grounds. To show that cooperation is based on selfish incentives, however, one must provide evidence that people do not cooperate without such incentives. In a series of experimental social dilemmas, subjects were instructed to make single, anonymous choices about whether or not to contribute money for a shared “bonus” that would be provided only if enough other people in the group also contributed their money. Noncontributors cited selfish reasons for their choices; contributors did not. If people are allowed to engage in discussion, they will contribute resources at high rates, frequently on irrational grounds, to promote group welfare. These findings are consistent with previous research on ingroup biasing effects that cannot be explained by “economic man” or “selfish gene” theories. An alternative explanation is that sociality was a primary factor shaping the evolution of Homo sapiens . The cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying such choices evolved under selection pressures on small groups for developing and maintaining group membership and for predicting and controlling the behavior of other group members. This sociality hypothesis organizes previously inexplicable and disparate phenomena in a Darwinian framework and makes novel predictions about human choice.

The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods Problems

This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of a minimal contributing set, always resulted in provision of the public good, and provision in a nearly optimal manner. In contrast, groups presented with the identical problem but not allowed to communicate failed to generate a sufficient number of contributions 35 percent of the time, and in slightly over half of the successful groups, overprovision produced inefficiency.We present hypotheses about why designating a minimal contributing set works, and data indicating that the mechanism results in reduced normative conflict and felt risk, as well as increased efficiency. The essential property of the minimal contributing set, we hypothesize, is criticalness: the contributions of the members of the minimal contributing set are each critical to obtaining the public good the members desire, and they know it. It is reasonable (albeit not a dominant strategy) to contribute because reasonable behavior can be expected from other minimal contributing set members who are in the same situation. Unreasonableness is a problem that increases with the size of groups, but adaptations exist that, we argue, can reduce its seriousness.

Not me or thee but we: The importance of group identity in eliciting cooperation in dilemma situations: Experimental manipulations

Abstract Cooperation in social dilemma situations is often explained in terms of egoistic incentives. These include: (i) explicit side payments in the form of rewards for cooperation and negative sanctions for defection, (ii) expectations of reciprocal altruism from others involved, and (iii) internalized positive utilities (e.g., an enhanced self-esteem) for ‘doing the thing’ or negative ones (e.g., a bad conscience) for defecting. Such egoistic explanations assumed that cooperation can occur only when the dilemma situation is, in effect, transformed into one not involving a dilemma. Subjects in experiments summarized here made a single anonymous binary choice between cooperation and defection involving substantial amounts of money. High rates of cooperation were, nevertheless, obtained when the benefits of doing so accrued to members of a group that discussed the problem. Cooperation was not enhanced by discussion when its benefits accrued to members of another group, from which subjects had been separated on a random basis only a few minutes earlier; thus, we reject the internalized norm hypothesis. Finally, while discussion involved a great deal of promising to cooperate, such promising was unrelated to actual choice – both at the individual and group level – except when it was unanimous. Both the hypothesis that promising yields expectations of a satisfactory payoff for cooperation, and that promising binds subjects to cooperate due to the social rewards and punishments for keeping or reneging on promises in similar situations outside our laboratory, imply a positive correlation between promising and cooperation short of universal promising, rather than the obtained step-level function at that point. Our conclusion is that a consensus of promising to cooperate indicates group identity, which must either interact with cooperative commitments to make them effective, or may in itself be a sufficient condition to elicit cooperation. Such cooperation is far from synonymous with morality.

Social welfare, cooperators' advantage, and the option of not playing the game

The AA. outline a model of how freedom to choose between playing and not playing particular Pisoners dilemma games can (1) increase social welfare and (2) provide relative gains to intending cooperators. When cooperators are relatively more willing to play, they will interact more frequently with each other and their pay off per encounter will be higher - potentially higher than that of intending defectors. The AA. speculate about the cognitive processes that underlie this result.

A Theory of Neighborhood Problem Solving: Political Action vs. Residential Mobility

PEOPLE HAVE THREE WAYS OF RESPONDING TO NEIGHBORHOOD PROBLEMS: LEAVING (EXIT), POLITICAL ACTION (VOICE), AND DOING NOTHING (PASSIVITY). THE MODEL ASSUMES THAT VOICE IS MORE LIKELY TO AMELIORATE NEIGHBORHOOD PROBLEMS THAN EXIT OR PASSIVITY; EXIT, IN FACT, CAN MAKE THINGS WORSE. RATIONAL BEHAVIOR ON THE PART OF RESIDENTS IS ALSO ASSUMED, COUPLED WITH CONSTRAINTS THAT LIMIT OPTIONS: STATUS, RACE, THE RESPONSIVENESS OF GOVERNMENT, AND THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM. SURVEY DATA ON ONE CITY ARE COMBINED WITH CENSUS DATA DIFFERENTIATING NEIGHBORHOOD TYPES. VOICE IS CHARACTERISTIC OF SUBURBAN AREAS AMONG HIGH AND LOW STATUS WHITES; EXIT IS CHARACTERISTIC OF WHITE URBAN AREAS. AMONG GHETTO BLACKS -- WHOSE EXIT OPTIONS ARE SEVERELY CONSTRAINED -- VOICE IS MOST CHARACTERISTIC. PROBLEMS FACED BY BLACKS AND WHITES LIVING IN THE CITY ARE SIMILAR, WHILE THEIR ADAPTATIONS ARE DIFFERENT. TRANSPORT (INCLUDING SUCH THINGS AS THE INADEQUACY OF PUBLIC TRANSPORT SYSTEMS, THEIR COST AND POOR COVERAGE, DIFFICULT ACCESS TO OTHER PARTS OF THE CITY) IS THE PRIORITY CONCERN IN THE SUBURBS. /AUTHOR/

Machiavellian Intelligence as a Basis for the Evolution of Cooperative Dispositions

How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the “Machiavellian intelligence” paradigm, which develops the idea that our brains have evolved, in substantial part, for capturing adaptive advantage from within-group competition. We use simulation to address the evolutionary relationship between basic Machiavellian capacities and cooperative dispositions. Results show that selection on such capacities can (1) permit the spread of cooperative dispositions even in cooperation-unfriendly worlds and (2) support transitions to populations with high mean cooperative dispositions. We distinguish between “rationality in action” and “rationality in design”—the adaptive fit between a design attribute of an animal and its environment. The combination of well-developed Machiavellian intelligence, modest mistrust, and high cooperative dispositions appears to be a rational design for the brains of highly political animals such as ourselves.

Religion, Context, and Constraint toward Strangers

Although it is widely believed that religion can constrain egoistic behavior, this has not been tested with behavioral data. This article provides such a test, using prisoners dilemma data collected in Logan, Utah, and in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon—contexts that differ sharply in both the incidence of religious affiliation and the extent to which one religious group dominates that context. There were three major findings: a widespread belief, shared equally by religious and nonreligious people, that religious people will cooperate more than nonreligious people; no relationship, in fact, between religious affiliation and cooperation; and an increase of cooperation with church attendance but only among Mormons in Logan. Consistent with standard experimental method, subjects in these experiments were assigned to experimental treatments randomly, meaning that the people they confronted were randomly met strangers. It is proposed that involvement with a religious institution will constrain behavior toward strangers only when the religious group dominates the ecology—and when there is, therefore, a high probability that such a randomly met stranger shares ones own religious affiliation.

Ancestral War and the Evolutionary Origins of Heroism

Primatological and archeological evidence along with anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies indicate that lethal between-group violence may have been sufficiently frequent during our ancestral past to have shaped our evolved behavioral repertoire. Two simulations explore the possibility that heroism (risking ones life fighting for the group) evolved as a specialized form of altruism in response to war. We show that war selects strongly for heroism but only weakly for a domain-general altruistic propensity that promotes both heroism and other privately costly, group-benefiting behaviors. A complementary analytical model shows that domain-specific heroism should evolve more readily when groups are small and mortality in defeated groups is high, features that are plausibly characteristic of our collective ancestral past.

Protest Participation among Southern Negro College Students

A recent article in this Review has drawn attention to the inadequacies in our knowledge of how great social movements arise. On the Negro protest movement there are many hypotheses but few attempts to relate them to differences in individual behavior. Considerable confusion also exists in the variety of explanatory terms involved. James A. Geschwinder lists five hypotheses that focus variously on economic conditions and the psychological meaning given them. They are the Vulgar Marxist hypothesis—that Negro dissatisfaction results from a progressive deterioration in the social and economic position of the race; the Rising Expectations hypothesis—that Negro expectations are rising more rapidly than their fulfillment; the Sophisticated Marxist hypothesis or the Relative Deprivation hypothesis—that Negro perceptions of white life have led to dissatisfaction with their own rate of improvement; the Rise and Drop hypothesis—that improvement in conditions followed by a sharp drop is responsible; and the Status Inconsistency hypothesis—that a group possessing status attributes ranked differently on various status hierarchies of a society will be dissatisfied and prone to rebellion. This paper will suggest that theory based on variations in the structure of intergroup relations can go some way toward integrating the different kinds of explanation that have been advanced. A more general aspiration is to draw attention to one set of terms that might be useful in the long overdue development of a genuinely comparative study of social movements such as the Negro movement. The broad hypothesis arising from—but by no means fully tested by—an examination of several individual and contextual variables is that proximity to the dominant white culture increases the likelihood of protest involvement . The analysis will give a priority to structural considerations, but will also suggest something about intervening psychological variables.

The Evolution of Political Intelligence: Simulation Results

Several bodies of theory develop the idea that the intelligence of highly social animals – most interestingly, humans – is significantly organized around the adaptive problems posed by their sociality. By this ‘political intelligence’ hypothesis, sociality selects for, among other attributes, capacities for ‘manipulating’ information others can gather about ones own future behaviour, and for ‘mindreading’ such manipulations by others. Yet we have little theory about how diverse parameters of the games that social animals play select for political intelligence. We begin to address that with an evolutionary simulation in which agents choose between playing Prisoners Dilemma and Hawk–Dove games on the basis of the information they can retrieve about each other given four broad information processing capacities. We show that political intelligence – operationally, the aggregate of those four capacities – evolves to its highest levels when co-operative games are generally more attractive than conflictual ones, but when conflictual games are at least sometimes also attractive.