Evidence map›Paper›PMID 27247059›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2016

Small groups and long memories promote cooperation.

Alexander J Stewart, Joshua B Plotkin

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
28citing papers in PubMed
35.3field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

28 citing papers in PubMed, 74 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Payoff equivalence and complete strategy spaces of direct reciprocity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  3. The dynamics of cooperation in asymmetric public goods games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  4. Article
  5. Unilateral incentive alignment in two-agent stochastic games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  6. Article
  7. Article
  8. Conditional cooperation with longer memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  9. Article
  10. Evolution of reciprocity with limited payoff memory.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024
    Article
  11. Resolving selfish and spiteful interdependent conflict.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024
    Review
  12. Article
  13. Mutation enhances cooperation in direct reciprocity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023
    Article
  14. Article
  15. Group reciprocity and the evolution of stereotyping.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023
    Article
  16. Article
  17. Article
  18. Article
  19. Article
  20. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Alexander J StewartDepartment of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Joshua B PlotkinDepartment of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
University of Pennsylvania · US

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Complex social behaviors lie at the heart of many of the challenges facing evolutionary biology, sociology, economics, and beyond. For evolutionary biologists the question is often how group behaviors such as collective action, or decision making that accounts for memories of past experience, can emerge and persist in an evolving system. Evolutionary game theory provides a framework for formalizing these questions and admitting them to rigorous study. Here we develop such a framework to study the evolution of sustained collective action in multi-player public-goods games, in which players have arbitrarily long memories of prior rounds of play and can react to their experience in an arbitrary way. We construct a coordinate system for memory-m strategies in iterated n-player games that permits us to characterize all cooperative strategies that resist invasion by any mutant strategy, and stabilize cooperative behavior. We show that, especially when groups are small, longer-memory strategies make cooperation easier to evolve, by increasing the number of ways to stabilize cooperation. We also explore the co-evolution of behavior and memory. We find that even when memory has a cost, longer-memory strategies often evolve, which in turn drives the evolution of cooperation, even when the benefits for cooperation are low.

Indexed as

Cooperative BehaviorModels, PsychologicalModels, StatisticalDecision MakingGames, ExperimentalGame TheoryHumansInterpersonal RelationsMemorySociobiology

Identifiers

PMID27247059
PMCPMC4887980
OpenAlexW2261291220

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.