Seminar Abstract

Friday, August 08, 2008 • 12:15 PM • Medium Conference Room, SFI

Karthik Panchanathan UCLA

Behavior Discussion Group - Reputation, Reciprocity, and Large-Scale Cooperation

Explaining the evolution of large-scale cooperation among non-kin, one of the distinguishing features of humans, continues to be a thriving research topic. Over the past twenty or so years, mechanisms like punishment, costly signaling, and group selection have been put forth as candidate explanations. There has been a backlash amongst some evolutionary psychologists, who assert that some combination of reputation and reciprocity are sufficient. In this talk, I present a series of models to assess this claim. It turns out, somewhat anti-climactically and unsurprisingly, that reputation and reciprocity can explain large-scale cooperation, depending on the assumptions. The results also indicate that there is nothing special about cooperation; mechanisms like reputation and reciprocity are agnostic with respect to their fitness or welfare consequences in the collective action domain, leading to the conclusion that reciprocity and reputation can only lead to large-scale cooperation when they interact with something like group selection.

Hosts: Dan Hurschka and Willemien Kets