Cultural Variation in Cooperation — Publications

Polarization Under Rising Inequality and Economic Decline

Alexander J. Stewart, Nolan McCarty, and Joanna J. Bryson, Science Advances, 6(50), Dec 2020.

This project came out of my work on cultural variation in public goods investment, crossed with getting asked on live TV whether AI was increasing inequality. I thought I’d better find out and went to talk by Nolan and learned about the correlation between inequality and polarization. I’ve been talking about this project for a couple years, but the model in the paper is entirely Alex. (I did replicate his work with an ABM, but that’s harder to analyze ... ). This has been my main research focus personally since 2016 and I’ve spoken about it a few times as a contribution to academic meetings, including EHBEA, APSA, and ICSD (well, Alex spoke about it there, I watched :-)

2020ScienceSitesDecember 15, 2020Ethics and Policy, Cultural Variation in Cooperation

Expectations of Fairness and Trust Co-Evolve in Environments of Partial Information

Paul Rauwolf & and Joanna J. Bryson, Dynamic Games and Applications, 8(4):891-917, 2018.

Highly relevant to information technology policy: The more you know, the less you need to trust, though if you know nothing or don’t have a choice of who you work with, people have no reason to be trustworthy. Trust comes with PARTIAL information, AND at least some freedom. Open access because Bath+Springer

Trust Communication, and Inequality

Joanna J. Bryson & Paul Rauwolf, from The 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 10-13 August 2016 in Philadelphia, PA.

Reviews Paul’s awesome work on understanding why it’s adaptive to both have blind faith in others in your community, yet refuse to cooperate with those making unfair but mutually-beneficial offers.

Value Homophily Benefits Cooperation But Motivates Employing Incorrect Social Information

Paul Rauwolf, Dominic Mitchell, and Joanna J. Bryson, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 367:246–261, 2015.

Preferring to cooperate with those with a similar cooperation style supports the evolution of cooperation. Reputations spread through gossip supports this strategy. But now that you are spreading two kinds of information (reputations of others, and your own style of cooperation) you can have a conundrum when these conflict. When there is such a conflict, signalling honestly about your cooperation strategy can be more beneficial to your community than telling the truth about someone else. Free open access draft is here. Software is coming soon. Draft is from October 2014, yet the work originally derived from On the Reliability of Unreliable Information: Gossip as Cultural Memory, which came out in 2016. Such is academia.

Understanding and Addressing Cultural Variation in Costly Antisocial Punishment (pdf)

Joanna J. Bryson, James Mitchell, Simon T. Powers, and Karolina Sylwester, in Applied Evolutionary Anthropology: Darwinian Approaches to Contemporary World Issues, Gibson & Lawson (eds.), Springer, 2014.

This book follows from a workshop. Here is a free version of the chapter, the revised draft from May 2013. See further our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page. Note: Google Scholar managed to find a USAF white paper derived from our final report by the same title which has a lot of irrelevant detail and a couple theoretical errors we’ve since discovered. The book chapter is 15 months more recent.

Homo Homini Lupus? Explaining Antisocial Punishment

Karolina Sylwester, Benedikt Herrmann, and Joanna J. Bryson, Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, 6(3): 167-188, 2013.

A review article; see further our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page. If you don’t have access to APA, here is the revised final version submitted to the publisher (May 2013).

The Role for Simulations in Theory Construction for the Social Sciences: Case Studies Concerning Divergent Modes of Religiosity

Harvey Whitehouse, Ken Kahn, Michael E. Hochberg, and Joanna J. Bryson, Religion, Brain & Behaviour, 2(3):182-224 (including commentaries and response), 2012.

I’m particularly pleased about this paper because it shows clearly how models can advance even well-established social-scientific theories provided that we work directly with domain experts who really understand the theory and data. There are some very pithy, quotable text about this in our response to commentaries, From the Imaginary to the Real: The Back and Forth Between Reality and Simulation. Open access pre-proof version of the target article, and of the response to commentaries. Associated software is available from the AmonI software page, and also in the electronic appendix. Oxford Anthropology have made a web page about our simulation of religion work.

Punishment Can Promote Defection in Group-Structured Populations

Simon T. Powers, Daniel J. Taylor and Joanna J. Bryson, The Journal of Theoretical Biology, 311:107-116, 2012.

Penultimate version on arXiv. This paper shows that punishment alone can’t explain altruism, the papers that thought it could didn’t take into account the well-documented behaviour of anti-social punishment. Basically, some people punish those that contribute to the public good. This is the first article of at least five we expect to publish explaining this phenomenon, and why it varies by culture. See our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page.

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