Reputational concerns and human cooperative behaviour
Humans possess the ability to display extraordinary generous benevolence and equally brutally malevolent. In many instances, in both recent and ancient history, humans have brought demonstrated these traits. For instance, today, there are several NGO’s and even private individuals who go out of their way to volunteer their time and resources to assist others. Some go as far as to sell their own possessions to raise money for the less fortunate. Often the recipients of this aid and the donors do not know one another. On the other extreme, there are often people who go out of their way to harm strangers, yet it does not benefit them at all. They often do this at great personal risk. The latter group, form a certain evolutionary perspective are an abnormally, while the latter is the rule. The doctrine of survival of the fittest suggests that the fittest would outmaneuver the rest and spread their genes. Those cooperative ones would be unable to defeat them and would those die out. Humans however, have and continue to demonstrate a great capacity for cooperation. One possible reason for this is reputational concerns. The actors want to have the reputation of being a benevolent nature. This paper examines the validity of this claim. It analyses whether it is indeed true that reputational concerns play a role in human cooperative behaviour.
Darwinian Theory of evolution theory introduced the idea of survival of the fittest. In his theory, Darwin surmised that as different species diverged from one another and developed different features, they began to compete with each other. In the theorem as the creatures began to evolve into certain biological niches, they would have to compete against the creatures in that niche. For instance, if a new carnivore evolved on the vast plains of the world, it would have to evolve to outmaneuver existing carnivore such as lions, in order to not only eat but to avoid being eaten. Therefore, hostility was built into this model; single actors are preferred in this model. However, humans and a small group of other animals developed cooperative dynamics instead. Humans, lions, Meercats and a host of other species live close together in groups and cooperatively help each other survive. Therefore, cooperation creates a unique problem for this theory.
Researchers have attempted to solve this problem through a variety of methods to try to explain this problem. Robert Axelrod, for instance, tried to play survival strategies against each other to see which win out over all the rest. He collected a variety of strategies and played them off against each other over several iterations to see which would win. A ‘tit-for-tat’ or TFT strategy won overwhelmingly. This strategy starts out by cooperating with the opposing strategy. However, on every subsequent move, it echoes or reciprocates the moves of the other. The TFT strategy proved to be robust enough to survive in a field against a variety of other strategies and stable enough to well against itself and be unsusceptible to invasion by a rare mutant strategy. However, this strategy is successful under certain conditions; for instance, there must be several iterations of the game where the strategies can play against each other. In one iteration, the TFT strategy player would either tie or lose against whichever strategy he was facing. Therefore, from these findings, regardless of reputation, it is beneficial to become cooperative when the game is played over several iterations. Since most of life’s situation are not one-off encounters, this strategy is naturally favoured, in the more repetitive interactions that we have day-to-day.
However, reputation does play a role in influencing human cooperation. Reputation is the consequence of playing this game in a social situation. A social situation is different from an isolated pairing since, in social setup, others can see your previous moves against other players. Hence this history becomes a reputation. Nowak & Sigmund’s simulation mapped out a situation where the TFT strategy was played in a social situation. They found that once again, cooperative individuals were more successful than those that were not. The payers were discriminatory and favoured players with a better reputation of being cooperative. Sugden in 1986, did a similar experiment which attempted to address the faults in Nowak & Sigmund’s simulation. In his model, he also found that those with a reputation of helping others also did better than those who did not.
In summary, reputational concerns do indeed play a role in human cooperative behaviour. The conflict between the Darwinian theory of evolution and the concept of cooperation also resolves itself. Darwin’s take is that the fittest survive while the rest die out. In the models and simulations, those who were cooperative indeed outperformed those who were not. Therefore, the TFT or cooperative strategy was the fittest strategy overall. In conclusion, it is indeed beneficial to cooperate, and reputation influences our cooperation since it improves our chances of survival.