Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites

The maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for the prosperity of human societies. Empirical studies show that high cooperation is frequently associated with the presence of strong social ties, but they are silent on whether a causal mechanism exists, how it operates, and what features of...

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Main Authors: Gallo, Edoardo, Riyanto, Yohanes E., Teh, Tat-How, Roy, Nilanjan
Other Authors: School of Social Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2019
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85329
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/49795
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-853292020-03-07T13:00:26Z Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites Gallo, Edoardo Riyanto, Yohanes E. Teh, Tat-How Roy, Nilanjan School of Social Sciences Human Behaviour Mathematics And Computing Social sciences::Economic development The maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for the prosperity of human societies. Empirical studies show that high cooperation is frequently associated with the presence of strong social ties, but they are silent on whether a causal mechanism exists, how it operates, and what features of the social environment are conducive to its emergence. Here we show experimentally that strong ties increase cooperation and welfare by enabling the emergence of a close-knit and strongly bound cooperative elite. Crucially, this cooperative elite is more prevalent in social environments characterized by a large payoff difference between weak and strong ties, and no gradation in the process of strengthening a tie. These features allow cooperative individuals to adopt an all or nothing strategy to tie strengthening based on the well-known mechanism of direct reciprocity: participants become very selective by forming strong ties only with other cooperative individuals and severing ties with everyone else. Once formed, these strong ties are persistent and enhance cooperation. A dichotomous society emerges with cooperators prospering in a close-knit, strongly bound elite, and defectors earning low payoffs in a weakly connected periphery. Methodologically, our set-up provides a framework to investigate the role of the strength of ties in an experimental setting. MOE (Min. of Education, S’pore) Published version 2019-08-27T07:32:23Z 2019-12-06T16:01:42Z 2019-08-27T07:32:23Z 2019-12-06T16:01:42Z 2019 Journal Article Gallo, E., Riyanto, Y. E., Teh, T.-H., & Roy, N. (2019). Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 10857-. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-47278-2 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85329 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/49795 10.1038/s41598-019-47278-2 en Scientific Reports © 2019 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. 9 p. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Human Behaviour
Mathematics And Computing
Social sciences::Economic development
spellingShingle Human Behaviour
Mathematics And Computing
Social sciences::Economic development
Gallo, Edoardo
Riyanto, Yohanes E.
Teh, Tat-How
Roy, Nilanjan
Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
description The maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for the prosperity of human societies. Empirical studies show that high cooperation is frequently associated with the presence of strong social ties, but they are silent on whether a causal mechanism exists, how it operates, and what features of the social environment are conducive to its emergence. Here we show experimentally that strong ties increase cooperation and welfare by enabling the emergence of a close-knit and strongly bound cooperative elite. Crucially, this cooperative elite is more prevalent in social environments characterized by a large payoff difference between weak and strong ties, and no gradation in the process of strengthening a tie. These features allow cooperative individuals to adopt an all or nothing strategy to tie strengthening based on the well-known mechanism of direct reciprocity: participants become very selective by forming strong ties only with other cooperative individuals and severing ties with everyone else. Once formed, these strong ties are persistent and enhance cooperation. A dichotomous society emerges with cooperators prospering in a close-knit, strongly bound elite, and defectors earning low payoffs in a weakly connected periphery. Methodologically, our set-up provides a framework to investigate the role of the strength of ties in an experimental setting.
author2 School of Social Sciences
author_facet School of Social Sciences
Gallo, Edoardo
Riyanto, Yohanes E.
Teh, Tat-How
Roy, Nilanjan
format Article
author Gallo, Edoardo
Riyanto, Yohanes E.
Teh, Tat-How
Roy, Nilanjan
author_sort Gallo, Edoardo
title Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
title_short Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
title_full Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
title_fullStr Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
title_full_unstemmed Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
title_sort strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
publishDate 2019
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85329
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/49795
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