ArticleScientific reports2017
The evolution of conditional moral assessment in indirect reciprocity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Variety-seeking in joint decisions: the role of reciprocity.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Impact of social rewarding in dynamic shop floor environments.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Institutions of public judgment established by social contract and taxation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Clarifying social norms which have robustness against reputation costs and defector invasion in indirect reciprocity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- 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
- Norms prioritizing positive assessments are likely to maintain cooperation in private indirect reciprocity.Scientific reports · 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 Bayesian reasoning and biases.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- When do stereotypes undermine indirect reciprocity?PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Evolution of norms for judging social behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Article
- Reputation structure in indirect reciprocity under noisy and private assessment.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The complexity of human cooperation under indirect reciprocity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The evolution of indirect reciprocity under action and assessment generosity.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Adherence to public institutions that foster cooperation.Nature communications · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Indirect reciprocity is a major mechanism in the maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals. Indirect reciprocity leads to conditional cooperation according to social norms that discriminate the good (those who deserve to be rewarded with help) and the bad (those who should be punished by refusal of help). Despite intensive research, however, there is no definitive consensus on what social norms best promote cooperation through indirect reciprocity, and it remains unclear even how those who refuse to help the bad should be assessed. Here, we propose a new simple norm called "Staying" that prescribes abstaining from assessment. Under the Staying norm, the image of the person who makes the decision to give help stays the same as in the last assessment if the person on the receiving end has a bad image. In this case, the choice about whether or not to give help to the potential receiver does not affect the image of the potential giver. We analyze the Staying norm in terms of evolutionary game theory and demonstrate that Staying is most effective in establishing cooperation compared to the prevailing social norms, which rely on constant monitoring and unconditional assessment. The application of Staying suggests that the strict application of moral judgment is limited.
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