ArticlePLoS computational biology2016
Social Norms of Cooperation in Small-Scale Societies.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- How large language models judge and influence human cooperation.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Incomplete reputation information and punishment in indirect reciprocity.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Exact conditions for evolutionary stability in indirect reciprocity under noise.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Picking strategies in games of cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Indirect reciprocity under opinion synchronization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Computational evolution of social norms in well-mixed and group-structured populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A mechanistic model of gossip, reputations, and cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Indirect reciprocity with stochastic and dual reputation updates.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary stability of cooperation in indirect reciprocity under noisy and private assessment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- EGTtools: Evolutionary game dynamics in Python.iScience · 2023Article
- Quantitative assessment can stabilize indirect reciprocity under imperfect information.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Social norms in indirect reciprocity with ternary reputations.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The complexity of human cooperation under indirect reciprocity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- A unified framework of direct and indirect reciprocity.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- The evolution of indirect reciprocity under action and assessment generosity.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Evolution of empathetic moral evaluation.eLife · 2019Article
- Low-cost, high-impact altruistic punishment promotes cooperation cascades in human social networks.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Indirect reciprocity with private, noisy, and incomplete information.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Indirect reciprocity, besides providing a convenient framework to address the evolution of moral systems, offers a simple and plausible explanation for the prevalence of cooperation among unrelated individuals. By helping someone, an individual may increase her/his reputation, which may change the pre-disposition of others to help her/him in the future. This, however, depends on what is reckoned as a good or a bad action, i.e., on the adopted social norm responsible for raising or damaging a reputation. In particular, it remains an open question which social norms are able to foster cooperation in small-scale societies, while enduring the wide plethora of stochastic affects inherent to finite populations. Here we address this problem by studying the stochastic dynamics of cooperation under distinct social norms, showing that the leading norms capable of promoting cooperation depend on the community size. However, only a single norm systematically leads to the highest cooperative standards in small communities. That simple norm dictates that only whoever cooperates with good individuals, and defects against bad ones, deserves a good reputation, a pattern that proves robust to errors, mutations and variations in the intensity of selection.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.