ArticleNature2018
Social norm complexity and past reputations in the evolution of cooperation.
Article in Nature, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers.
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Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed.
- How large language models judge and influence human cooperation.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Why human societies adopt rigid moral rules: The efficiency-robustness trade-off.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Temporality modulates the effect of network heterogeneity on cooperation fixation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- LLM agents overcome the machine penalty when acting fairly but not when acting selfishly or altruistically.National science review · 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
- Institutions of public judgment established by social contract and taxation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Why people follow rules.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Reciprocity evolves more readily in competitive than cooperative socio-ecologies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Picking strategies in games of cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of behavioral motivations for cooperation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Evolution of indirect reciprocity under emotion expression.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Indirect reciprocity under opinion synchronization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evolutionary mechanisms that promote cooperation may not promote social welfare.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- 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
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Indirect reciprocity is the most elaborate and cognitively demanding of all known cooperation mechanisms, and is the most specifically human because it involves reputation and status. By helping someone, individuals may increase their reputation, which may change the predisposition of others to help them in future. The revision of an individual's reputation depends on the social norms that establish what characterizes a good or bad action and thus provide a basis for morality. Norms based on indirect reciprocity are often sufficiently complex that an individual's ability to follow subjective rules becomes important, even in models that disregard the past reputations of individuals, and reduce reputations to either 'good' or 'bad' and actions to binary decisions. Here we include past reputations in such a model and identify the key pattern in the associated norms that promotes cooperation. Of the norms that comply with this pattern, the one that leads to maximal cooperation (greater than 90 per cent) with minimum complexity does not discriminate on the basis of past reputation; the relative performance of this norm is particularly evident when we consider a 'complexity cost' in the decision process. This combination of high cooperation and low complexity suggests that simple moral principles can elicit cooperation even in complex environments.
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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.