Evolutionary roots of cooperation

Posted on by

A commenter points to John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Michael E. Price (2006)

We think that human evolutionary history has equipped the human mind with specialized psychological adaptations designed to realize gains in trade that occur both in 2-party exchanges and in n-party exchanges, including collective actions. We believe that the specific characteristics of these mechanisms (e.g. cheater detection circuits) reflect the ancestrally recurrent structure of these adaptive problems (the existence of payoffs to cheating). . .we
think that many of the ‘irrational’ behavioral expressions of these mechanisms (such as voting behavior or donating blood) will come to be recognized as engineering byproducts of these functional designs when they are activated outside of the ancestral envelope of conditions for which they were designed.

Later:

the greater the number of participants is, the greater the comparative advantage of conservatively perpetuating pre-existing arrangements will be, however beneficial or flawed those pre-existing arrangements were.

Because it is difficult to foster cooperation among large numbers of people, we rightly seek to preserve systems that work.

We feel pleasure upon becoming a valued member of a group, satisfaction in its creation and successes, and sadness at its dissipation.

Think of finding a job or losing a job.

Still later:

we think that the human mind contains an evolved, functionally specialized motivational mechanism that, when exposed to a situation of personal exploitation, generates a punitive sentiment toward the agent that is deriving an unfair advantage in an exchange

Hence the furor over “price gouging.”

Punitive strategists switch on the productive possibilities of the groups they are in, unleashing collective efforts that would otherwise be inhibited by the presence of free riders. This happens because the presence of punitive strategists in potential exchange interactions repels free riders, causing them either to avoid such interactions or to become (facultatively, in the presence of punitive strategists) behavioral cooperators. Because free riders avoid punitive strategists, punitive strategists will far more often find themselves in groups without free riders

Many people feel sentiments according to the following social exchange logic: I will give up the benefits of violating this moral rule if others in my social world do. If I followed the rule, and you did not, I have been cheated by you. The more others cheat on a rule I follow, the more exploited I feel, and the more tempted I am to discontinue following the rule when it is costly to do so

13 thoughts on “Evolutionary roots of cooperation”

  1. Very strongly applies to driving – when I’m going 10 mph above, and folk pass me …

    If I followed the rule, and you did not, I have been cheated by you.
    Both moral rules and legal rules.

    This is also where anti-discrimination laws interact against irrational virtue signalling to have a better outcome than “mob market” behavior. Also related to normal folk disapproval of hypocrisy – advocating an action, like wearing a mask, but outside of the camera NOT wearing a mask. Like 2 of 3 cameramen in a news broadcast to shame non-mask wearers.

    Taleb’s note is relevant on masks:
    https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7

    It’s also relevant on looting – if some are looting with impunity, those who are there and fail to loot are suckers. Being a “sucker” is not quite the same as being cheated, but there are many similarities.

    Under the commies a common slogan was “those who don’t steal from the state, steal from their families”. With lots of justification.

    • I would think I could find a citation for this “common slogan” but I could not.

  3. I think an under-appreciated public policy goal is to maintain a sense of fairness. When you do something like fail to prosecute anyone in the GFC or allow huge companies to pay a single-digit tax rate, it has huge negative repercussions beyond the issues themselves.

    • True. The government is largely in the PR business; in a democracy, its policies are designed to make the average voter feel (relatively) good about the socio-political situation, rather than to maximize social prosperity/well-being. A policy that is inferior in narrowly economic terms may be superior on the whole, for its PR value; for, if it had not been adopted, politics would have been poisoned by widespread ill-feeling (envy, anger at supposed exploitation, etc.), leading to very bad consequences.

      • Yes, the elites are insane to have let our current sense of “unfairness” reach the levels it has. It takes a lot for people to become motivated to retaliate…but when they there is not guarantee it will be “rational.” Hence today’s confused elites.

  4. Seems related to a concept I developed. (although probably, many people discovered it before me).

    Why are so many people angered by the great wealth of a Bill Gates or a Jeff Bezos, with an intuition that Gates/Bezos gathered their wealth at the expense of other people, when actually they earned the wealth by helping other people? I think it goes to our evolutionary development in tribal society.

    To discern an answer to this question, look at a different question: why do people hate the New England Patriots, the New York Yankees, and Duke basketball? Because they get more than their share. And in the zero-sum interactions of tribal society, when someone gets more than their share, everyone else gets less than their share. I think we evolved with a “functionally specialized motivational mechanism that, when exposed to a situation of personal exploitation, generates a punitive sentiment toward the agent that is deriving an unfair advantage in an exchange.”

    I believe that motivational mechanism is so deep-seated that people are pre-disposed to dislike the wealthy and want to take their wealth. Only by dispassionately examining the logic of the wealth creation — perhaps through education in economics — can one override that pre-disposition.

    • There is some rationality to it. Wealth is not a zero-sum game…unless a vital resource was ever to become scarce. Then issues of resource allocation become very pressing and you wouldn’t want to be in the bottom half of any distribution. For much of human history this may have resembled reality.

    • I very much used to think that we evolved in such a zero-sum environment.

      Now I think we have two similar but different measures:
      wealth
      status.

      Market capitalism is positive sum wealth – but still only zero sum status.

      The rage comes more from lack of status, rather than lack of wealth/ comfort. Too many people want to be in the top 10% …

      • Agree. Which is why my other post above about maintaining a sense of “fairness” is so important. Status is zero-sum; but at least if we believe high-status is earned and deserved the rest can probably tolerate it. (I suppose other societies have made it work by believing high-status is granted by gods or lineage etc but that’s inconsistent with our narrative).

  5. “It is as if we had to do with a parliament of genes: each acts in it’s own self- interest, but if its acts hurt others, they will combine together to suppress it. The transmission rules of meiosis evolve as increasingly inviolable rules of fair play, a constitution designed to protect the parliament against the harmful acts of one or a few.”
    -E.G. Leigh

    The human genetic neuroprogramming hypothesis is somewhat undercut by the wide range of mutualism behavior exhibited between species. “Cooperation” occurs in plants, landscapes, and indeed in nearly every direction we look. Human evolution continues and centuries of communal domestication undoubtedly suppressed many evolutionary hunter gatherer adaptive genes much as the same centuries quashed democratic tribal equality.

    Leigh may be of interest to this discussion in that he incorporates Adam Smith analogies into his biological observations.
    See: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02114.x
    And he has been looking into these questions since at least 1991 (see Trends in Ecology & Evolution Volume 6, Issue 8, August 1991, Pages 257-262
    PerspectiveGenes, bees and ecosystems: The evolution of a common interest among individuals.)

    The most important lesson I think that we can derive from these stories though, is that the enormous flow of progress is generated by countless interactions and the flow of progress is more likely to be disrupted by the intervention of anti-democratic know-it-alls, a thesis somewhat developed by Michael Latner in a 2011 article on the evolutionary logic of constitutional democracy.

  6. Unary exchange, binary, then trinary

    We do not to N-ary exchange. Instead we introduced the market maker, the
    entrepreneur. We are still 3D. The entrepeneur has a simple rule, do not get over run by the mobs.

  7. There are biological mechanisms at play embedded in neural correlates (which are also identifiable in nonhuman species). Research by Sarah Brosnan (psychologist, neuroscientist, cognitive processes of cooperation and reciprocity) and Frans de Waal (biologist and primatologist) show that…

    “Cooperation could not have evolved without mechanisms to ensure the sharing of payoffs. For an individual to cooperate with an unrelated partner to achieve goals that it cannot achieve alone or to exchange favors over time requires an ability to compare payoffs with investments. Given the ample evidence for mutualistic cooperation and reciprocal altruism […] in humans as well as other species (hereafter, animals), we therefore expect well-developed capacities for payoff evaluation in species that flexibly cooperate with individually known partners. We also expect negative reactions to excessive payoff imbalances, because such imbalances undermine cooperation among nonrelatives, which requires proportionality between effort and gain so that gains among parties jointly contributing to a given enterprise are shared.” (Brosnan & de Waal, 2014)

    Here is a TED talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg) where de Waal presents their findings (jump to 1:19 to see the actual experiments with the capuchin monkeys and chuckle at the very human-like reaction of one of the furry subjects.

    From the conclusions in their 2014 paper:

    “Not only are signs of first-order IA [inequity aversion] evident in several cooperative species, in the form of a negative reaction to disadvantageous unequal outcomes, but also our closest relatives, the anthropoid apes, show evidence of second-order IA, an essential component of human fairness because it seeks to equalize outcomes. Thus, humans and other species seem to share basic reactions to inequity, which serve the need for sustained cooperation […].” (Brosnan & de Waal, 2014)

    Before anyone jumps to claiming sharing equally, this doesn’t mean, however, that people should be getting the same reward for different levels of contribution:

    “Humans’ unprecedented brain enlargement allows for greater understanding of the benefits of self-control in the context of resource division. Additionally, the development of language enabled communication about third parties, which may have enhanced the role of reputation building.” (Brosnan & de Waal, 2014)

    – – – – – – – – – –

    References

    Brosnan, S., de Waal, F. Monkeys reject unequal pay. Nature 425, 297–299 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01963/

    Brosnan SF, de Waal FB. Evolution of responses to (un)fairness. Science. 2014;346(6207):1251776. doi:10.1126/science.1251776). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4451566/

Comments are closed.