Cultural Variation in Cooperation

While headlines can make us feel that humans tend to treat each other badly, what makes bad news news is that humans in fact are extremely cooperative.  We help strangers without thinking — in fact we are even more likely to help if we don't think much about it.  We live and work with people we are in competition with, yet most of the time we treat them decently. 

The research described here is part of a larger research programme in Cognitive Science.  The Amoni group work to both build cognitive systems and understand cognition in nature.  In humans (and probably other species) much of the power of cognition (thinking) comes from our ability to reuse what others have already thought.  Thus understanding social behaviour is also key to understanding human cognition.

Science is often advanced by comparing two things and asking why they are different.  So we look at cooperation, especially information sharing, in a variety of species.  Since 2010, we've also been looking at  cultural variation in human economic behaviour.  The data we originally worked to explain comes from a type of behavioural economics experiment called public goods games.  Our research has lead us to look at understanding cooperation more broadly, and to look at group formation, culture and identity, the evolution of culture, contracts and ethics.

Altruism, Punishment and Public Goods

Hypotheses

• Individuals need to invest in their own individual welfare to survive, but they also on average do better in life if they invest in public goods.
• Striking the "right" (optimal) balance between these two strategies is difficult, because optimality depends on changing opportunities and other factors such as how reliable the rule of law is.  Also, tradeoffs mean there are many possible good solutions.
• Given varying costs and benefits, a population as a whole can wind up tracking these changing optima by being composed of members that over- and under-invest in public goods.  The socioeconomic dynamics will drive the balances of costs and benefits (which depend partly on how many people exploit each strategy) such that approximately appropriate numbers of people will exploit the different strategies.
• One of the proximate mechanism for deciding whether to be so competitive that you punish even altruists is your sense of in-group or out-group identity. Most people won't punish altruists with whom they identify.

Public Goods, Political Polarization, and Wealth Inequality

One of the models we developed in trying to understand the dynamics of social learning underlying the system of hypotheses just described exhibited an odd gap in public goods investment between sub populations.  We came to discover that human populations also sometimes show significant divergence in opinions concerning ideal investment in a particular public, or put another way, split into two publics.  This process is known as political polarization.  This has lead us to other hypotheses, concerning in group and out group formation.

Hypotheses

• Humans are extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely successful at dominating our ecosystem partly because we are able to rapidly adjust the size of our groups, or even hold multiple conflicting concepts of identity (complete with identity indicators such as skills and memories) allowing us to rapidly alternate between publics in which we invest.
• When individuals seem to be losing status within one public, they tend to form a new, smaller sub group of that public in which they invest more heavily.
• Membership of these new groups may be flagged by classic identity indicators such as ethnicity, but also more flexible indicators such as unusual beliefs.  This could account for both early, imagistic religions (which tend to be highly dynamic) and contemporary "post factualism".
  

Publications

Results from our research have been presented at a number of meetings, and a number of articles are in preparation or under review.  As they get published we list them here, along with open-access draft versions.  For PDFs of the published offprints, email any author.  Full citations and many more PDFs can be found on Bryson's publications page.

• Joanna J. Bryson and Nolan McCarty, Polarization and Inequality: Towards a Mechanistic Account. E-poster presented at the American Political Science Association 1-4 September 2016 (Philadelphia, PA. )  Associated paper(s) in prep.
  
• Joanna J. Bryson and  Paul Rauwolf, Trust Communication, and Inequality.  From The 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 10-13 August 2016  (Philadelphia, PA. )
  
• Paul Rauwolf, Dominic Mitchell, and Joanna J. Bryson, Value homophily benefits cooperation but motivates employing incorrect social information, Journal of Theoretical Biology 367:246–261.
• Daniel J. Taylor, Evolution of the Social Contract, PhD Dissertation, University of Bath, November 2014.
  
• Karolina Sylwester, Benedikt Herrmann, and Joanna J. Bryson, Homo homini lupus? Explaining antisocial punishment. In Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, 6(3):167-188. Green open access: revised final version submitted to the publisher (May 2013).
• Joanna J. Bryson, James Mitchell, Simon T. Powers, and Karolina Sylwester, Understanding and Addressing Cultural Variation in Costly Antisocial Punishment.  In Applied Evolutionary Anthropology, Gibson & Lawson (eds.), Springer, 2014.
• Simon T. Powers, Daniel J. Taylor and Joanna J. Bryson, Punishment can promote defection in group-structured populations,  The Journal of Theoretical Biology, 311:107-116.  Penultimate draft.
• Harvey Whitehouse, Ken Kahn, Michael E. Hochberg, and Joanna J. Bryson, The role for simulations in theory construction for the social sciences: Case studies concerning Divergent Modes of Religiosity, Religion, Brain & Behaviour, 2(3):182-224 (including commentaries and response.) Associated software is in the electronic appendix and on the AmonI software page. Bath also hosts open access versions of the target article and the response, for the full PDF (including commentaries) email me.

• Dominic Mitchell, Joanna J. Bryson, Paul Rauwolf, and Gordon Ingram, On the reliability of unreliable information: Gossip as cultural memory, in Interaction Studies, vol. 17:1 pp. 1–25.
  
• Ivana Cace and Joanna J. Bryson, Agent Based Modelling of Communication Costs: Why Information Can Be Free, in Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication C. Lyon, C. L Nehaniv and A. Cangelosi, eds., pp. 305-322, Springer 2007. 
• Joanna J. Bryson, Yasushi Ando and Hagen Lehmann Agent-based models as scientific methodology: A case study analysing primate social behaviour, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B - Biology, 362(1485):1685-1698, September 2007.  The case analysed in this paper concerns Hemelrijk's DomWorld, that link includes the associated software.

Researchers

• Joanna Bryson is the Principle Investigator.
  
• Simon Powers was a Post-doctoral Research Officer in Social Simulation and is a current collaborator.
  
• Karolina Sylwester was a Post-doctoral Research Officer in Behavioural Economics and is a current collaborator.
  
• James Mitchell was a Research Programmer:  AI Development Environments for Social Simulation and is still offering collaboration and support despite returning to industry.
• Paul Rauwolf, a former PhD student in AmonI, now a postdoc at the Oxford Institute of New Economic Thinking.
• Nolan McCarty, head of Politics at Princeton, has the data on the dynamics of political polarisation we are now modelling.

Former

• Daniel Taylor,  a graduated PhD student in AmonI, was funded by the University of Bath on the overheads from this project.
• Dominic Mitchell, a part-time PhD student formerly in AmonI.
• Benedikt Herrmann, originally of Nottingham, currently of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, provided collaboration in the early years mostly in the form of discussion and advice, but also with data.
  

About the group

• Joanna Bryson's research summary on her publications concerning the evolution of human-like culture, and also on primate social structures.
  
• The Amoni software page distributes our published simulations.

• Substantial:  to better understand why there should be geographic variation in what at least superficially appears to be a maladaptive economic behaviour (anti-social punishment).  
• Methodological:  to improve the current methodologically state of the art in collaboration between social simulation / agent based modelling and the social sciences.