ArticleScientific reports2021
Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust?
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Exploring the experiences, views, and needs of family members of emergency response workers: a systematic review and meta-synthesis.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Pooled it
- A meta-analytical umbrella review assessing urban environment exposures and cognitive health outcomes.Age and ageing · 2026Pooled it
- Economic inequality fosters unethical behaviour by promoting the perception of immoral and competitive normative climates.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Perceptions of anomie in society shape support for wealth redistribution.The British journal of social psychology · 2026Article
- Disentangling the impacts of collective mobility of residents and non-residents on burglary levels.Computational urban science · 2026Article
- From Bacillus Criminalis to the Legalome: Will Neuromicrobiology Impact 21st Century Criminal Justice?Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Poverty is associated with both risk avoidance and risk taking: empirical evidence for the desperation threshold model from the UK and France.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Prospective Health Impacts of a Universal Basic Income: Evidence from Community Engagement in South Tyneside, United Kingdom.International journal of social determinants of health and health services · 2024Article
- High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Desperation and inequality increase stealing: evidence from experimental microsocieties.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Why is violence high and persistent in deprived communities? A formal model.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Of precarity and conspiracy: Introducing a socio-functional model of conspiracy beliefs.The British journal of social psychology · 2023Article
- Cooperation as a signal of time preferences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitation to explore why this should be. Distinctively, our model features a desperation threshold, a level of resources below which it is extremely damaging to fall. Agents do not belong to fixed types, but condition their behaviour on their current resource level and the behaviour in the population around them. We show that the optimal action for individuals who are close to the desperation threshold is to exploit others. This remains true even in the presence of severe and probable punishment for exploitation, since successful exploitation is the quickest route out of desperation, whereas being punished does not make already desperate states much worse. Simulated populations with a sufficiently unequal distribution of resources rapidly evolve an equilibrium of low trust and zero cooperation: desperate individuals try to exploit, and non-desperate individuals avoid interaction altogether. Making the distribution of resources more equal or increasing social mobility is generally effective in producing a high cooperation, high trust equilibrium; increasing punishment severity is not.
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Registered trials
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.