Criminal Defectors Lead to the Emergence of Cooperation in an Experimental, Adversarial Game

While the evolution of cooperation has been widely studied, little attention has been devoted to adversarial settings wherein one actor can directly harm another. Recent theoretical work addresses this issue, introducing an adversarial game in which the emergence of cooperation is heavily reliant on the presence of “Informants,” actors who defect at first-order by harming others, but who cooperate at second-order by punishing other defectors. We experimentally study this adversarial environment in the laboratory with human subjects to test whether Informants are indeed critical for the emergence of cooperation. We find in these experiments that, even more so than predicted by theory, Informants are crucial for the emergence and sustenance of a high cooperation state. A key lesson is that successfully reaching and maintaining a low defection society may require the cultivation of criminals who will also aid in the punishment of others.

[1]  I. Spergel,et al.  : Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community Control , 1994 .

[2]  Robert J. Sampson,et al.  Crime in Cities: The Effects of Formal and Informal Social Control , 1986, Crime and Justice.

[3]  R. Boyd,et al.  Coordinated Punishment of Defectors Sustains Cooperation and Can Proliferate When Rare , 2010, Science.

[4]  R. Sampson,et al.  Community Structure and Crime: Testing Social-Disorganization Theory , 1989, American Journal of Sociology.

[5]  Colin Camerer,et al.  When Does "Economic Man" Dominate Social Behavior? , 2006, Science.

[6]  D. Collard,et al.  Trust : making and breaking cooperative relations , 1989 .

[7]  H. Gintis,et al.  A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution , 2011 .

[8]  Wesley G. Skogan,et al.  Community Organizations and Crime , 1988, Crime and Justice.

[9]  E. Ostrom.  Collective action and the evolution of social norms , 2000, Journal of Economic Perspectives.

[10]  Lawrence W. Sherman,et al.  Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community Control , 2002 .

[11]  U. Fischbacher.  z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments , 1999 .

[12]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-Governance Is Possible , 1992, American Political Science Review.

[13]  Hilla Peretz,et al.  Ju n 20 03 Schrödinger ’ s Cat : The rules of engagement , 2003 .

[14]  Robert Rowthorn,et al.  When in Rome, do as the Romans do: the coevolution of altruistic punishment, conformist learning, and cooperation , 2007 .

[15]  J. Figueira-Mcdonough.  : Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods , 1992 .

[16]  E. Fehr,et al.  Altruistic punishment in humans , 2002, Nature.

[17]  R. Boyd,et al.  Indirect reciprocity can stabilize cooperation without the second-order free rider problem , 2004, Nature.

[18]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Lab Experiments for the Study of Social-Ecological Systems , 2010, Science.

[19]  M. Short,et al.  Cooperation and punishment in an adversarial game: how defectors pave the way to a peaceful society. , 2010, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[20]  C. Hauert,et al.  Via Freedom to Coercion: The Emergence of Costly Punishment , 2007, Science.

[21]  Attila Szolnoki,et al.  Punish, but not too hard: how costly punishment spreads in the spatial public goods game , 2010, 1007.0431.

[22]  Diego Gambetta.  Trust : making and breaking cooperative relations , 1992 .

[23]  Ernst Fehr,et al.  Third Party Punishment and Social Norms , 2004 .

[24]  R Boyd,et al.  Why people punish defectors. Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas. , 2001, Journal of theoretical biology.

[25]  Attila Szolnoki,et al.  Defector-Accelerated Cooperativeness and Punishment in Public Goods Games with Mutations , 2010, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[26]  E. Fehr,et al.  Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[27]  R. Boyd,et al.  The evolution of altruistic punishment , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[28]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  The nature of human altruism , 2003, Nature.

[29]  Attila Szolnoki,et al.  Evolutionary Establishment of Moral and Double Moral Standards through Spatial Interactions , 2010, PLoS Comput. Biol..

[30]  G. M. Shewan,et al.  Criminology , 1896, The Indian medical gazette.

[31]  S. Raudenbush,et al.  Neighborhoods and violent crime: a multilevel study of collective efficacy. , 1997, Science.

[32]  Karl Sigmund,et al.  Punish or perish? Retaliation and collaboration among humans. , 2007, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[33]  June S. Beittel.  Mexico's Drug-Related Violence , 2009 .

[34]  C. Hauert,et al.  Punishment and reputation in spatial public goods games , 2003, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.