People often cooperate and obey norms in situations where it is clear they cannot be caught and punished. Such behavior does not serve their self-interest, as they are foregoing opportunities to exploit others without any negative consequences. Hence, it is not clear how this behavior could have evolved. Some previous explanations invoked the existence of other-regarding preferences, moral motivation, or intrinsic concern for social norms. In this study, we develop an agent-based model illustrating that none of these is necessary for the emergence of norm-abiding behavior. Our model suggests evolutionary pressure against norm violators may lead to the emergence of a bias, causing agents to be extremely sensitive to the probability of being caught. Because of this, they often incorrectly classify anonymous situations as non-anonymous ones and obey social norms due to the fear of being punished. In our simulations, we show that cooperation is promoted by (1) the number of interactions actually observed, (2) the strength of punishments against norm violators, and most importantly, (3) the uncertainty in agent classifications.
BatsonC. D. (2016). What’s wrong with morality? A social-psychological perspective. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
2.
BearA.RandD. G. (2016). Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 936–941. doi:10.1073/pnas .1517780113
3.
BeckerG. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. The Journal of Political Economy, 76, 169–217. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1830482
4.
BinmoreK. (2005). Natural justice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
5.
BinmoreK. (2006). Why do people cooperate?Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 5, 81–96. doi:10.1177/1470594X060 60620
6.
BurnhamT. C.JohnsonD. D. (2005). The biological and evolutionary logic of human cooperation. Analyse & Kritik, 27, 113–135.
7.
CosmidesL.ToobyJ. (1994). Better than rational: Evolutionary psychology and the invisible hand. The American Economic Review, 84, 327–332. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117853
8.
CushmanF. (2015). Punishment in humans: From intuitions to institutions. Philosophy Compass, 10, 117–133. doi:10. 1111/phc3.12192
9.
DeltonA. W.KrasnowM. M.CosmidesL.ToobyJ. (2011). Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 13335–13340. doi:10.1073/pnas.1102131108
10.
FawcettT. W.FallensteinB.HigginsonA. D.HoustonA. I.MallpressD. E.TrimmerP. C.McNamaraJ. M. (2014). The evolution of decision rules in complex environments. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 153–161. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.12.012
11.
FawcettT. W.HamblinS.GiraldeauL. A. (2013). Exposing the behavioral gambit: The evolution of learning and decision rules. Behavioral Ecology, 24, 2–11. doi:10.1093/beheco/ars085
12.
FehrE.HenrichJ. (2003). Is strong reciprocity a maladaptation? On the evolutionary foundations of human altruism. In HammersteinP. (Ed.), Genetic and cultural evolution of cooperation (pp. 52–82). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
13.
FischbacherU.Föllmi-HeusiF. (2013). Lies in disguise—An experimental study on cheating. Journal of the European Economic Association, 11, 525–547. doi:10.1111/jeea.12014
14.
FrankR. (1988). Passions within reason: The strategic role of the emotions. W. W. Norton & Company.
15.
GiardiniF.ConteR. (2015). Revenge and conflict: Social and cognitive aspects. In D’ErricoF.PoggiI.VinciarelliA.VinczeL. (Eds.), Conflict and multimodal communication: Social research and machine intelligence (pp. 71–89). Springer International. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-14081-0_4
16.
GilovichT.MedvecV. H.SavitskyK. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 211–222. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211
17.
GintisH.BowlesS.BoydR.FehrE. (2003). Explaining altruistic behavior in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24, 153–172. doi:10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00157-5
18.
GreenD. M.SwetsJ. A. (1966). Signal detection and psychophysics. New York, NY: John Wiley.
19.
GreeneJ. D.PaxtonJ. M. (2009). Patterns of neural activity associated with honest and dishonest moral decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 12506–12511. doi:10.1073/pnas.0900152106
20.
GrossJ.MéderZ. Z.Okamoto-BarthS.RiedlA. (2016). Building the Leviathan—Voluntary centralisation of punishment power sustains cooperation in humans. Scientific Reports, 6, Article 20767. doi:10.1038/srep 20767
21.
GualaF. (2012). Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35, 1–15. doi:10.1017/S0140525X 11000069
22.
HagenE. H.HammersteinP. (2006). Game theory and human evolution: A critique of some recent interpretations of experimental games. Theoretical Population Biology, 69, 339–348. doi:10.1016/j.tpb.2005.09.005
23.
HaseltonM. G.BryantG. A.WilkeA.FrederickD. A.GalperinA.FrankenhuisW. E.MooreT. (2009). Adaptive rationality: An evolutionary perspective on cognitive bias. Social Cognition, 27, 733–763. doi:10.1521/soco .2009.27.5.733
24.
HaseltonM. G.BussD. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81–91. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.1.81
25.
HaseltonM. G.NettleD. (2006). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 47–66. doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3
26.
HaseltonM. G.NettleD.MurrayD. R. (2016). The evolution of cognitive bias. In BussD. M. (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology, volume 2: Integrations (2nd ed., pp. 968–987). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
27.
HertwigR.HerzogS. M. (2009). Fast and frugal heuristics: Tools of social rationality. Social Cognition, 27, 661–698. doi:10.1521/soco.2009.27.5.661
28.
HodgsonG. H. (2013). From pleasure machines to moral communities: An evolutionary economics without homo economicus. The University of Chicago Press.
29.
HutchinsonJ. M.GigerenzerG. (2005). Simple heuristics and rules of thumb: Where psychologists and behavioural biologists might meet. Behavioural Processes, 69, 97–124. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2005.02.019
30.
JohnsonD. D.BlumsteinD. T.FowlerJ. H.HaseltonM. G. (2013). The evolution of error: Error management, cognitive constraints, and adaptive decision-making biases. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28, 474–481. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.014
31.
Kraft-ToddG.YoeliE.BhanotS.RandD. (2015). Promoting cooperation in the field. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 3, 96–101. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2015. 02.006
32.
KrasnowM. M.DeltonA. W. (2016). Are humans too generous and too punitive? Using psychological principles to further debates about human social evolution. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 799. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00799
33.
KrasnowM. M.DeltonA. W.ToobyJ.CosmidesL. (2013). Meeting now suggests we will meet again: Implications for debates on the evolution of cooperation. Scientific Reports, 3, Article 1747. doi:10.1038/srep01747
34.
LevittS. D.ListJ. A. (2007). What do laboratory experiments measuring social preferences reveal about the real world?The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21, 153–174. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30033722
35.
MargolisH. (2002). Altruism and Darwinian rationality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 269–270. doi:10.1017/S0140525X02430051
36.
MazarN.AmirO.ArielyD. (2008). The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self-concept maintenance. Journal of Marketing Research, 45, 633–644. doi:10.1509/jmkr. 45.6.633
37.
McKayR. T.DennettD. C. (2009). The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 493–510. doi:10.1017/S0140525X09990975
38.
McNamaraJ. M.HoustonA. I. (2009). Integrating function and mechanism. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24, 670–675. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2009.05.011
39.
NesseR. M. (2001). The smoke detector principle: Natural selection and the regulation of defensive responses. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 935, 75–85. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb03472.x
40.
NesseR. M. (2005). Natural selection and the regulation of defenses: A signal detection analysis of the smoke detector principle. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 88–105. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.002
41.
NettleD.NottK.BatesonM. (2012). “Cycle thieves, we are watching you”: Impact of a simple signage intervention against bicycle theft. PLoS ONE, 7(12), e51738. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051738
42.
NeymanJ.PearsonE. S. (1933). On the problem of the most efficient tests of statistical hypotheses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A: Containing Papers of a Mathematical or Physical Character, 231, 289–337. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/91247
43.
NicklischA.GrechenigK.ThöniC. (2016). Information-sensitive Leviathans. Journal of Public Economics, 144, 1–13. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.09.008
44.
NowakM. A. (2006). Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science, 314, 1560–1563. doi:10.1126/science.1133755
45.
PfattheicherS.KellerJ. (2015). The watching eyes phenomenon: The role of a sense of being seen and public self-awareness. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 560–566. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2122
46.
RaihaniN. J.BsharyR. (2015). Why humans might help strangers. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9, Article 39. doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00039
47.
RandD. G.GreeneJ. D.NowakM. A. (2012). Spontaneous giving and calculated greed. Nature, 489, 427–430. doi:10.1038/nature11467
48.
RandD. G.NewmanG. E.WurzbacherO. M. (2015). Social context and the dynamics of cooperative choice. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 28, 159–166. doi:10.1002/bdm.1837
49.
RandD. G.PeysakhovichA.Kraft-ToddG. T.NewmanG. E.WurzbacherO.NowakM. A.GreeneJ. D. (2014). Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation. Nature Communications, 5, Article 3677. doi:10.1038/ ncomms4677
50.
RichersonP.BaldiniR.BellA. V.DempsK.FrostK.HillisV.RossC. (2016). Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, e30. doi:10.1017/S0140525X1400106X
51.
SchwartzB. (1986). The battle for human nature: Science, morality and modern life. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
52.
SperberD.BaumardN. (2012). Moral reputation: An evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Mind & Language, 27, 495–518. doi:10.1111/mila.12000
53.
SripadaC.StichS. (2006). A framework for the psychology of norms. In CarruthersP.LaurenceS.StichS. P. (Eds.), The innate mind, volume 2: Culture and cognition (pp. 280–301). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
54.
WelshB. C.FarringtonD. P. (2009). Public area CCTV and crime prevention: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Justice Quarterly, 26, 716–745. doi:10.1080/07418820802506206
55.
WestS. A.El MoudenC.GardnerA. (2011). Sixteen common misconceptions about the evolution of cooperation in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32, 231–262. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.08.001
56.
WilenskyU. (1999). NetLogo. Evanston, IL: Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University. Retrieved from http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
57.
YamagishiT.LiY.TakagishiH.MatsumotoY.KiyonariT. (2014). In search of homo economicus. Psychological Science, 25, 1699–1711. doi:10.1177/0956797 614538065
58.
YamagishiT.TeraiS.KiyonariT.MifuneN.KanazawaS. (2007). The social exchange heuristic: Managing errors in social exchange. Rationality and Society, 19, 259–291. doi:10.1177/1043463107080449
59.
ZimmermannJ.EffersonC. (2017). One-shot reciprocity under error management is unbiased and fragile. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38, 39–47. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbe hav.2016.06.005
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
