People willingly follow norms and values, often incurring material costs. This behaviour supposedly stems from evolved norm psychology, contributing to large-scale cooperation among humans. It has been argued that cooperation is influenced by two types of norms: injunctive and descriptive. This study theoretically explores the socialisation of humans under these norms. Our agent-based model simulates scenarios where diverse agents with heterogeneous norm psychologies engage in collective action to maximise their utility functions that capture three motives: gaining material payoff, following injunctive and descriptive norms. Multilevel selective pressure drives the evolution of norm psychology that affects the utility function. Further, we develop a model with exapted conformity, assuming selective advantage for descriptive norm psychology. We show that norm psychology can evolve via cultural group selection. We then identify two normative conditions that favour the evolution of norm psychology, and therefore cooperation: injunctive norms promoting punitive behaviour and descriptive norms. Furthermore, we delineate different characteristics of cooperative societies under these two conditions and explore the potential for a macro transition between them. Together, our results validate the emergence of large-scale cooperative societies through social norms and suggest complementary roles that conformity and punishment play in human prosociality.

Game riskiness is an index to describe the variance of outcomes of choosing cooperation relative to that of choosing defection in prisoner’s dilemmas (PD). When the variance of cooperation is larger (smaller) than that of defection, the PD is labeled as a more-risky PD (less-risky PD). This article extends the previous work on game riskiness by examining its moderating role on the effect of expectation on cooperation under various PDs. We found across three studies that game riskiness moderated the effect of expectation on cooperation such that the effect of expectation on cooperation was larger in more-risky PDs than in less-risky counterparts. This effect was observed in N-person PD (Study 1), PD presented in both gain and loss domains (Study 2), and PD where expectation was manipulated instead of measured (Study 3). Furthermore, we found that participants cooperated more in PDs presented in the gain domain compared to those presented in the loss domain, and this effect was again moderated by game riskiness. In addition, we illustrated mathematically that game riskiness is related to other established indices of PD, including the index of cooperation, fear index, and greed index. This article identified game riskiness as a robust situational factor that can impact decisions in social dilemmas. It also provided insights into the underlying motivations of cooperation and defection under different expectations and how game riskiness can be utilized in cooperation research.

The question of whether extraterrestrials exist has driven both the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and some attempts of messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence (METI). Nevertheless, no data-driven or theory-based behavioural policy has been suggested. Here we simulate a comprehensive set of human–extraterrestrial strategic interactions, modelled as two-by-two game-theoretic matrices. We examine a sample of possible outcomes by relying on the theory of subjective expected relative similarity (SERS), which takes into account both the expected payoffs and the extent of strategic similarity – the prospects of the opponent making identical choices. Simulation results suggest: focusing messaging efforts on signalling of complete strategic similarity, monitoring potential alien communications for similarity-indicating signals, and using risk-averse decision rules for policy planning and decision-making. The discussion puts forward three guidelines for METI initiatives and addresses the relevance of the findings to human conflict management.

Cooperative behavior constitutes a key aspect of human society and non-human animal systems, but explaining how cooperation evolves represents a major scientific challenge. It is now well established that social network structure plays a central role for the viability of cooperation. However, not much is known about the importance of the positions of cooperators in the networks for the evolution of cooperation. Here, we investigate how the spread of cooperation is affected by correlations between cooperativeness and individual social connectedness (such that cooperators occupy well-connected network positions). Using simulation models, we find that these correlations enhance cooperation in standard scale-free networks but not in standard Poisson networks. In contrast, when degree assortativity is increased such that individuals cluster with others of similar social connectedness, we find that Poisson networks can maintain high levels of cooperation, which can even exceed those of scale-free networks. We show that this is due to dynamics where bridge areas between social clusters act as barriers to the spread of defection. We also find that this positive effect on cooperation is sensitive to the presence of Trojan horses (defectors placed within cooperator clusters), which allow defection to invade. The results provide new knowledge about the conditions under which cooperation may evolve, and are also relevant to consider in regard to the design of cooperation studies.

An important quality to assess in others is their cooperativeness. We hypothesized that people use linguistic markers in their partners’ speech as a proxy of their cooperativeness in other tasks: specifically, we predicted that participants would prefer syntactically similar conversation partners as cooperation partners in a monetary game. We found that, indeed, participants preferably selected syntactically similar conversation partners as cooperation partners, but only when the participants could communicate using their naturally preferred constructions. In contrast, when participants were forced to communicate using dispreferred constructions, they rather cooperated with those partners that matched their natural preference than with those that matched their overt linguistic use. This pattern of results was likely driven by participants valuing representational alignment (i.e., being aligned on both linguistic features and their mental representations) more than incidental behavioral alignment (i.e., superficial convergence on similar linguistic features during interaction). This is because representational alignment is a potential indicator of group membership and may be associated with in-group benefits such as reputation, reciprocity and normative behavior. Those benefits may outweigh the benefits of simple behavioral alignment, which could be a potential indicator of others’ willingness to cooperate. This has important implications for communication in intercultural settings where members of diverse linguistic groups negotiate cooperative actions.

Brazil is among the few countries where income distribution has become fairer in recent decades. Its Gini coefficient fell significantly in the 2000s while the left-wing Workers’ Party government approved key equity-enhancing reforms in Congress. By analyzing hundreds of news pieces, legislative documents, and secondary sources, I show the strategies that incumbents from the left adopted to build and manage cross-party coalitions that allowed structural changes to materialize. This research is the first systematic effort to detail how three consequential redistributive policies in the areas of conditional cash-transfer programs, education, and minimum wages found their way through a fragmented legislature where the chief executive’s party was minoritarian. Findings add nuance to social policymaking and reveal that partisanship-based approaches to how inequality declined in Latin America require deeper complexification. In the Brazilian case, leftist presidents improved redistribution by investing in multiparty cooperative arrangements while ideology got diluted in the process.

The number of studies examining gender differences in the social relationship rewards associated with costly religious practice has been surprisingly low. Here, we use data from 289 residents of an agricultural Tibetan village to assess whether individuals are more inclined to establish supportive relationships with religious individuals in general and to investigate the gender disparities in the relationship between religiosity and personal network characteristics. Our results reveal that participation in religious rituals contributes to the overall development of social support networks. The benefits to personal networks, however, seem to be contingent upon gender. For resource-intensive, infrequent religious rituals such as distant pilgrimages, males seem to benefit slightly more in terms of elevated in-degree values in their personal networks, despite similar levels of investment as females. In contrast, for daily, low-cost religious practices requiring ongoing participation, both genders obtain similar increases in in-degree values through regular engagement. It becomes more challenging for women to increase their status in communities when the effort invested in religious rituals yields smaller rewards compared with the same effort by men, contributing to ongoing gender inequality. These findings highlight the importance of examining the particular characteristics of religious rituals and the gender disparities in the associated rewards.

We study why suffering a negative economic shock, i.e., a significant loss, may trigger a change in other-regarding behavior. We conjecture that people trade off concern for money with a conditional preference to follow social norms and that suffering a shock makes extrinsic motivation more salient, leading to more norm violation. This hypothesis is grounded on the premise that preferences are norm-dependent. We study this question experimentally: after administering losses on the earnings from a real-effort task, we analyze choices in prosocial and antisocial settings. To derive our predictions, we elicit social norms for each context analyzed in the experiments. We find evidence that shock increases deviations from norms.