Sadism, the Intuitive System, and Antisocial Punishment in the Public Goods Game

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Pfattheicher ◽  
Johannes Keller ◽  
Goran Knezevic
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Aggressive Behavior ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
The Public ◽  
Destructive Behavior ◽  
Public Goods Games ◽  
The Social ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
Reflective Processes

In public goods situations, a specific destructive behavior emerges when individuals face the possibility of punishing others: antisocial punishment, that is, costly punishing cooperative individuals. So far, little is known about the (intuitive or reflective) processes underlying antisocial punishment. Building on the Social Heuristics Hypothesis and arguing that antisocial punishment reflects the basic characteristics of sadism, namely, aggressive behavior to dominate and to harm other individuals it is assumed that everyday sadists intuitively engage in antisocial punishment. Two studies document that activating (Study 1) and inhibiting (Study 2) the intuitive system when a punishment option can be realized in one-shot iterated public goods games increased (Study 1) and reduced (Study 2) antisocial punishment, in particular among individuals who reported a proneness to sadism. In sum, the present research suggests that sadistic tendencies executed intuitively play a crucial role regarding antisocial punishment in public goods situations.

Endogenous Authority and Enforcement in Public Goods Games

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wooyoung Lim ◽  
Jipeng Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Efficiency Gain ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Goods Games ◽  
Efficient Outcome ◽  
The Social

AbstractThis paper investigates theoretically and experimentally the social benefits and cost to have an endogenous punishment-enforcing authority in public goods game. An authority is chosen among members of a society via an imperfectly discriminating contest prior to a public goods game. Once chosen the authority has a large degree of discretion to inflict punishment. Our theoretical result shows that an efficiency gain from having the endogenous authority always comes with a social cost from competing for being the authority. The larger the society is, however, the bigger the efficiency gain and the smaller the rent dissipation. The completely efficient outcome can be approximated as the size of society tends to infinity. The experimental results confirm that the presence of endogenous authority for a given group size increases the public goods contributions and the efficiency gain is significantly bigger in a larger group.

scholarly journals Payoff-based learning explains the decline in cooperation in public goods games

2015 ◽  
Vol 282 (1801) ◽  
pp. 20142678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell N. Burton-Chellew ◽  
Heinrich H. Nax ◽  
Stuart A. West
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Social Preferences ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Learning Rule ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
Conditional Cooperation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Goods Games ◽  
Competing Hypotheses

Economic games such as the public goods game are increasingly being used to measure social behaviours in humans and non-human primates. The results of such games have been used to argue that people are pro-social, and that humans are uniquely altruistic, willingly sacrificing their own welfare in order to benefit others. However, an alternative explanation for the empirical observations is that individuals are mistaken, but learn, during the game, how to improve their personal payoff. We test between these competing hypotheses, by comparing the explanatory power of different behavioural rules, in public goods games, where individuals are given different amounts of information. We find: (i) that individual behaviour is best explained by a learning rule that is trying to maximize personal income; (ii) that conditional cooperation disappears when the consequences of cooperation are made clearer; and (iii) that social preferences, if they exist, are more anti-social than pro-social.

scholarly journals Punishment Strategies across Societies: Conventional Wisdoms Reconsidered

Games ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Ramzi Suleiman ◽  
Yuval Samid
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Strong Predictor ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
The World ◽  
Emergence Of Cooperation ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Cost

Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has been detected, punishment was detrimental to cooperation. The success of punishment in enhancing cooperation was explained as deterrence of free riders by cooperative strong reciprocators, who were willing to pay the cost of punishing them, whereas in environments in which punishment diminished cooperation, antisocial punishment was explained as revenge by low cooperators against high cooperators suspected of punishing them in previous rounds. The present paper reconsiders the generality of both explanations. Using data from a public goods experiment with punishment, conducted by the authors on Israeli subjects (Study 1), and from a study published in Science using sixteen participant pools from cities around the world (Study 2), we found that: 1. The effect of punishment on the emergence of cooperation was mainly due to contributors increasing their cooperation, rather than from free riders being deterred. 2. Participants adhered to different contribution and punishment strategies. Some cooperated and did not punish (‘cooperators’); others cooperated and punished free riders (‘strong reciprocators’); a third subgroup punished upward and downward relative to their own contribution (‘norm-keepers’); and a small sub-group punished only cooperators (‘antisocial punishers’). 3. Clear societal differences emerged in the mix of the four participant types, with high-contributing pools characterized by higher ratios of ‘strong reciprocators’, and ‘cooperators’, and low-contributing pools characterized by a higher ratio of ‘norm keepers’. 4. The fraction of ‘strong reciprocators’ out of the total punishers emerged as a strong predictor of the groups’ level of cooperation and success in providing the public goods.

scholarly journals Cooperation and competition between pair and multi-player social games in spatial populations

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Attila Szolnoki ◽  
Xiaojie Chen
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Evolutionary Game Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Pair Interaction ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
Point Interactions ◽  
Social Games ◽  
The Public ◽  
Specific Parameter ◽  
Group Members

AbstractThe conflict between individual and collective interests is in the heart of every social dilemmas established by evolutionary game theory. We cannot avoid these conflicts but sometimes we may choose which interaction framework to use as a battlefield. For instance some people like to be part of a larger group while other persons prefer to interact in a more personalized, individual way. Both attitudes can be formulated via appropriately chosen traditional games. In particular, the prisoner’s dilemma game is based on pair interaction while the public goods game represents multi-point interactions of group members. To reveal the possible advantage of a certain attitude we extend these models by allowing players not simply to change their strategies but also let them to vary their attitudes for a higher individual income. We show that both attitudes could be the winner at a specific parameter value. Interestingly, however, the subtle interplay between different states may result in a counterintuitive evolutionary outcome where the increase of the multiplication factor of public goods game drives the population to a fully defector state. We point out that the accompanying pattern formation can only be understood via the multipoint or multi-player interactions of different microscopic states where the vicinity of a particular state may influence the relation of two other competitors.

Group preferential selection promotes cooperation in spatial public goods game

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (11) ◽  
pp. 1450062 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong-Bin Zhang ◽  
Hong Wang
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Square Lattice ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
Learning Mechanism ◽  
Preferential Selection ◽  
Cooperative Evolution ◽  
Public Goods Games

We study the evolution of cooperation in public goods games on the square lattice, focusing on the co-player learning mechanism based on the preferential selection that are brought about by wealthy information of groups where participants collect and search for potential imitators from those groups. We find that co-player learning mechanism based on the choice of weighted group can lead to the promotion of public cooperation by means of the information of wealthy groups that is obtained by participants, and after that the partial choice of public goods groups is enhanced with the tunable preferential parameter. Our results highlight that the learning interactions is not solely confined to the restricted connection among players, but co-players of wealthy groups have the opportunity to be as a role model in the promotion of cooperative evolution. Moreover, we also find the size of learning affects the choice of distant players, cooperators (defectors) having more paths to exploit the phalanx of opponents to survive when the value of preferential parameter is small. Besides, the extinction thresholds of cooperators and defectors for different values of noise are also investigated.

scholarly journals Evolutionary dynamics in the public goods games with switching between punishment and exclusion

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (10) ◽  
pp. 103105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linjie Liu ◽  
Shengxian Wang ◽  
Xiaojie Chen ◽  
Matjaž Perc
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Goods Games

Institutions as Fields of Action

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Albert W. Dzur
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
The Social

Institutions shape how citizens think about the social problems they handle, repelling public awareness and involvement by performing tasks in ways that neutralize the citizen’s role. Democratic professionals seek to change this dynamic by building access points and infusing citizen agency at critical junctures throughout major public institutions. The kind of citizen–professional collaborations democratic professionals aim to foster directly address the kinds of counter-democratic tendencies that reinforce callousness and make social problems difficult to handle. The motivations of democratic professionals can be understood through the theory of participatory democracy, which draws attention to the hazards representative governments create by thinking and acting for citizens. Participatory democrats acknowledge the difficulties of fostering civic agency in modernity and attempt to theorize how citizens can occupy a more active role in contemporary political culture and take up a civic responsibility for the public goods and social harms produced by their institutions.

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