Science and Religion Today » Cooperation

Evidence That Generosity Is Contagious

Heather Wax — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:10:45 +0000

Here’s a neat illustration from James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego and Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University that shows how kindness and generosity can spread from person to person to person, even when they’re strangers, creating what amounts to a domino effect.
Experiments found that if Eleni increases how much money she contributes to the public good when paired with Lucas, it benefits Lucas, and he gives more when paired with Erika. Erika then gives more when paired with Jay, and he gives more when paired with Brecken. The effect seems to last through three degrees of separation, meaning Eleni’s initial contribution can be tripled.
The kindness and generosity also spreads over time: Lucas gives more when paired with Erika and also when he’s later paired with Lysander, Bemy, Sebastian, and Nicholas. The results suggest that a small number of people can make a huge positive difference.
“Personally,” Fowler says in a write-up of the research, “it’s very exciting to learn that kindness spreads to people I don’t know or have never met. We have direct experience of giving and seeing people’s immediate reactions, but we don’t typically see how our generosity cascades through the social network to affect the lives of dozens or maybe hundreds of other people.”
It’s important to keep in mind that if Eleni decreases her contribution to the public good, that uncooperative behavior can spread through the social network as well, the researchers say. But as Christakis (who also co-wrote the book Connected with Fowler) points out:

Our work over the past few years, examining the function of human social networks and their genetic origins, has led us to conclude that there is a deep and fundamental connection between social networks and goodness. The flow of good and desirable properties like ideas, love, and kindness is required for human social networks to endure, and, in turn, networks are required for such properties to spread. Humans form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs.

Help Haiti by Buying Positive Psychology Books

Heather Wax — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:48:24 +0000

Robert Biswas-Diener is donating proceeds of the sales of his workbooks to the Mercy Corps relief mission.

Positive Interactions Promote Cooperation

Heather Wax — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:29:28 +0000

Martin Nowak is quite excited about his new paper in this week’s Science. He writes to us:

I think it has a simple and very interesting result: Reward is better than punishment in promoting public cooperation. (Surprisingly, this finding goes against the current dogma in the field.)

In this case, Nowak and his team had groups of volunteers play a public goods game in which players could decide how much money they wanted to contribute to a common pot and how much they wanted to keep for themselves (the pot would then be divided evenly among the players). Obviously, it’s best for the group if everyone donates the maximum, since it means more money for everyone, but self-interest tells us to donate nothing and freeload off the group. So the researchers added a catch to the classic problem: In some games, players could reward or punish another player for his contribution or lack thereof.
After many rounds of the game, it turns out reward and punishment are equally good at promoting cooperation within the group. But groups in which people could reward each other ended up wealthier than the groups in which people used punishment. When both options are available, rewarding other players leads to greater contributions and payoff, while punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff.
As the researchers then note in their paper:

Sometimes it is argued that it is easier to punish people than to reward them. We think this is not the case. Life is full of opportunities for mutually beneficial trade, as well as situations where we can help others, be they friends, neighbors, office mates, or strangers. We regularly spend time and effort, as well as money, to assist people around us. This assistance can be minor, like helping a friend to move furniture, working extra shifts to cover for an ill co-worker, or giving directions to a tourist. It can also be more important, like recommending a colleague for promotion or speaking out to support a victim of discrimination. These sorts of productive interactions are the building blocks of our society and should not be disregarded.

Why Friendship Is Like Alliance Politics

Heather Wax — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:05:00 +0000

If you’ve ever watched the TV show Survivor, you’ve no doubt noticed how crucial alliances are and how they constantly change and shift as players jockey for position and try to keep themselves from getting voted out of the game. Part of the reason an alliance of more than two people is so hard to keep together is that there’s always a hierarchy of allegiance; loyalty, support, and protection do not apply equally among all. This is usually the argument one alliance uses to lure over a player from the bottom of another, bigger alliance: Being fourth from the top in our alliance, they say, is better than being fifth from the top in theirs. It’s an argument that works with varying success.
So I was interested to read about a new theory called the “Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship,” based on a study by Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban, psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania. The psychologists say that how you rank your best friends is closely related to how you think these friends rank you.
As Kurzban notes:

Friendships are about alliances. We live in a world where conflict can arise and allies must be in position beforehand. This new hypothesis takes into account how we value those alliances. In a way, one of the main predictors of friendship is the value of the alliance. The value of an ally, or friend, drops with every additional alliance they must make, so the best alliance is one in which your ally ranks you above everyone else as well.

Traditionally, friends have been thought of as “exchange partners” based on the “theory of reciprocal altruism.” But research has shown that we don’t regularly keep track of the benefits we give and receive in our close friendships, and we help close friends even when the likelihood of them repaying us is slim. The “alliance” theory of friendship is more optimistic since “it’s not what you can do for me, it’s how much you like me,” says Kurzban. “In this manner even the weakest nations, for example, or the least popular kid at the party with nary an alliance in the room is set up to be paired with someone looking for a friend.”
Assuming he’s right, can we use this to our advantage? Yup, the psychologists say, by 1) ranking our friends, 2) ranking them according to our position in their rankings (preferring friends who rank us higher—our more reliable allies), and 3) hiding our friend-ranking. —Heather Wax

"Consistent Contributors" Help Their Groups

Heather Wax — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Those who set an example of cooperative, collective behavior make groups they’re in more successful, according to a recent study. “Groups and organizations face a fundamental problem: They need cooperation but their members have incentives to free ride,” J. Mark Weber, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto, and J. Keith Murnighan, a professor of management and organization at Northwestern University, write in the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Weber and Murnighan looked at data from experiments in which participants could either keep small amounts of money or contribute them to the group. The “consistent contributors”—those who offered up their money regardless of what others did—set a tone of cooperation that made their groups more efficient and productive. In the end, everyone in the consistent contributors’ groups came out ahead, challenging the common wisdom that consistent contributors were suckers who always finished last. — Kimberly Roots

An Evolutionary Advantage in Keeping Tempo?

Heather Wax — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:04:00 +0000

A new study out of Stanford University suggests that when people participate in synchronized activities—like the singing and chanting involved in many religious rituals—they become more likely to cooperate with one another. In one experiment, psychologists Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath had two groups of people walk around campus, one group walking normally and the other in-step. In another experiment, they had two groups listen to music on headphones and move cups back and forth in time to the beat. The members of one group all listened to the same music (so their movements were synchronous), while members of the other group listened to music with different tempos. After both experiments, members of the synchronized groups had a stronger sense that they were part of the same team, and they were more cooperative when they played economic games set up by the researchers—even making personal sacrifices, such as giving up their own money, to benefit the group. According to the researchers, who publish their results in the journal Psychological Science, “synchrony rituals may have therefore endowed some cultural groups with an advantage in societal evolution, leading some groups to survive where others have failed.” —Heather Wax

Costly Punishment Is Not a Winning Strategy

Heather Wax — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Costly punishment—in which one person punishes another at a cost to himself—rarely pays off, according to a new study by Harvard University mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak and his colleagues Hisashi Ohtsuki and Yoh Iwasa that appears in last week’s edition of the journal Nature. In fact, Nowak says, “efficient cooperation cannot be based on punishment. This is a very positive result.”
To study cooperation and punishment, the scientists created a computer simulation of a population in which each interaction leads to either a good or bad reputation; cooperation leads to a good reputation, while not cooperating leads to a bad one. Players could then choose whether to cooperate, punish, or opt out of interactions with another player—based on their observations of the other person and information about the person’s past decisions with other players. “Our behavior toward other people depends not only on what they have done to us but also on what they have done to others. Indirect reciprocity works through reputation,” the researchers write.
When asked if they want to donate money to another person, for example, the “experiment shows that people base their decisions on what the recipient has done before. Generous people are more likely to receive donations,” writes Nowak in an essay that appeared in an earlier edition of Nature. Because we spend most of our lives in a relatively small population in which we interact with the same people over and over again, we continually monitor and interpret how others act toward us and others. “When deciding how to act, we take into account—often subconsciously—the possible consequences for our own reputation,” Nowak says. “Moreover, our own observations are often not enough; we want to learn from the experiences of others.”
Punishment, the researchers found, is only a successful strategy when our assessment of other people’s reputations—and what others say about them—is reliable; in real life, however, perception and gossip can often lead to errors. In most cases, then, a population does better by not using punishment; instead, the best strategy is to withhold help from someone you think has a poor reputation or has made unfavorable decisions in the past. —Heather Wax

Religious Believers Are Nicer—Sometimes

Heather Wax — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:41:00 +0000

People who believe in God tend to be more honest, helpful, and generous than those who aren’t believers—but only when they think such acts will enhance their personal reputation or when religious thoughts are freshly activated (even subconsciously) in their minds, according to a new study published in the journal Science. In other words, religious people are on their best behavior when they think God or others are watching.
To reach this conclusion, University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff looked at anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics research from the last 30 years. They found that across the disciplines, religion and belief in a morally concerned God are shown to foster cooperation and trust, and make people more likely to engage in prosocial behavior (acts that benefit others at a personal cost). “One reason we now have large, cooperative societies may be that some aspects of religion—such as outsourcing costly social policing duties to all-powerful Gods—made societies work more cooperatively in the past,” says Shariff. These large, stable societies, the researchers explain, were then able to successfully pass on their cultural beliefs.
But the study also finds that in many cases, those who don’t believe in God act as prosocially as religious believers do, and there are certainly nonreligious institutions that involve effective policing and social surveillance. “Some of the most cooperative modern societies are also the most secular,” Norenzayan says. “People have found other ways to be cooperative—without God.” —Heather Wax

It Pays to Have Faith in Cooperation

Heather Wax — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:13:00 +0000

Martin Nowak, a mathematician and biologist at Harvard University and director of its Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, has long studied cooperation among genes, cells, and humans, and recently, he’s been working on mathematically modeling the origin of life. Now, he’s started another new research project with Sarah Coakley, formerly at the Harvard Divinity School and now at the University of Cambridge. Together, they’re studying the way religious people and nonbelievers think about and view cooperation, and early results show, says Coakley, that those who are religious have a stronger belief in cooperation’s power. According to their previous research, which also combined evolutionary theory and theology, cooperation is the centerpiece of a winning game plan for life; the math demonstrates that it pays to be generous, forgiving, and hopeful. —Heather Wax

Winners Don’t Punish

Heather Wax — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:13:00 +0000

A group of researchers led by Martin Nowak, a professor of biology and mathematics and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, wrote in to tell us about their new paper, in this week’s edition of Nature:

We show that individuals who engage in costly punishment in a cooperation game do not benefit from their behavior. The study found that the use of punitive behavior correlates strongly with reduced individual payoff, and bestows no benefit on the group as a whole.
These results demonstrate that costly punishment is not an effective force for promoting cooperation. The unfortunate tendency of humans to engage in acts of spiteful punishment must have evolved for other reasons such as establishing dominance hierarchy and defending ownership, but not to promote cooperation. In cooperation games, costly punishment is a detrimental and self-destructive behavior.
Our finding has a very positive message: In an extremely competitive setting, the winners are those who resist the temptation to escalate conflicts, while the losers punish and perish.
—Anna Dreber, department of economics, Stockholm School of Economics, Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics
David Rand, Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and department of systems biology
Drew Fudenberg, Harvard’s department of economics
Martin Nowak, Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, department of mathematics, and department of organismic and evolutionary biology