This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When one person helps, or refuses to help, another in public, this may change not only the provider's reputation but also the recipient's. A theoretical study led by Kobe University offers a simple explanation for how cooperation in large communities becomes stable and provides insights into phenomena like the bystander effect.
A society is built on our ability to cooperate, but why did we begin to cooperate in the first place? As Kobe University social psychologist Tham Yukari Jessica explains, "Cooperation seems so natural in everyday life, but from an evolutionary perspective, it is actually puzzling why individuals should bear costs to help others, and that fundamental question has stayed with me ever since I was a graduate student." Researchers across the social sciences are trying to identify the rules and norms that allow cooperation to emerge as a stable social feature. In pairwise relationships, it is easy to keep track of another person's reputation, which then tells us how to interact with that person.
As groups get larger, however, people's evaluations of others start to diverge. Such disagreements in reputation make it difficult for cooperation to remain stable in theoretical models. To explain how cooperation can nevertheless be maintained, researchers have incorporated additional mechanisms into their models, such as gossip and public institutions.
"These mechanisms can help people align their views of others, but they require additional information sharing or coordination," Tham adds. She and her collaborators from RIKEN and the Interdisciplinary Transformation University took a simpler approach. In standard models of cooperation, observers update their opinion of the person who decides whether to help—the donor—but not of the person on the receiving end.
The researchers asked what would happen if observers used the same interaction to update their opinion of the recipient as well. "If Alice sees Bob help Charlie, she may infer that Charlie is someone worthy of being helped, or at least that Bob considers Charlie worthy of help. In this way, people may gain information about how others view a person simply by observing how that person is treated, without any additional information sharing," Tham explains.
They constructed a model that allows observers of an interaction to update their views of both the donor and the receiver. They then explored whether this leads to norms—rules that tell people how to treat people with a certain reputation and how to evaluate their actions—that enable socially stable cooperation. In the journal PNAS, they report that this seemingly small change can have a major effect.
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