Researchers on the Max Planck Institute in Plön show that status plays a key role in determining which rewarding policies people adopt. Using game theory, they explain why individuals learn to make use of rewards to specifically promote good behaviour.

Often, we use positive incentives like rewards to advertise cooperative behaviour. But why will we predominantly reward cooperation? Why is defection rarely rewarded? Or more generally, why will we trouble to interact in any type of rewarding in the primary place? Theoretical work done by researchers Saptarshi Pal and Christian Hilbe on the Max Planck Research Group ‘Dynamics of Social Behaviour’ suggests that status effects can explain why individuals learn to reward socially.

With tools from evolutionary game theory, the researchers construct a model where individuals in a population (the players) can adopt different strategies of cooperation and rewarding over time. On this model, the players’ status is a key element. The players know, with a level of certainty (characterised by the knowledge transmissibility of the population), how their interaction partners are going to react to their behavior (that’s, which behaviors they deem worthy of rewards). If the knowledge transmissibility is sufficiently high, players learn to reward cooperation. In contrast, without sufficient details about peers, players refrain from using rewards. The researchers show that these effects of status also play out in an identical way when individuals interact in groups with greater than two individuals.

Antisocial rewarding

Along with highlighting the role of status in catalyzing cooperation and social rewarding, the scientists discover a few scenarios where antisocial rewarding may evolve. Antisocial rewarding either requires populations to be assorted or rewards to be mutually helpful for each the recipient and the provider of the reward. “These conditions under which individuals may learn to reward defection are nonetheless a bit restrictive since they moreover require information to be scarce” adds Saptarshi Pal.

The outcomes from this study suggest that rewards are only effective in promoting cooperation after they can sway individuals to act opportunistically. These opportunistic players only cooperate after they anticipate a reward for his or her cooperation. The next information transmissibility increases each, the motivation to reward others for cooperating, and the motivation to cooperate in the primary place. Overall, the model suggests that when people reward cooperation in an environment where information transmissibility is high, they ultimately profit themselves. This interpretation takes the altruism out of social rewarding – people may not use rewards to boost others’ welfare, but to assist themselves.

Source:

Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft)