Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cooperation and Status Competition in Public Goods Games

博士论文研究：公共物品博弈中的合作与地位竞争

• 批准号: 1025275
• 负责人: Daniel Houser
• 金额: $ 0.6万
• 依托单位: George Mason University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2012-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1025275&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Cooperation; Status

This research addresses how evolutionarily evolved preferences for displayable rewards modulates male and female generosity in competitive social dilemmas. Altruistic cooperation is indispensible in human societies, and much progress has been made towards developing institutions to promote pro-social decisions. Economists have focused on punishment and rewards, but often find that incentives can crowd out intrinsic motives for cooperation and detrimentally impact efficiency. At the same time, evolutionary biologists have long recognized that cooperation, especially food sharing, is typically efficiently organized in groups living on wild foods even absent formal economic incentives. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, the study hypothesize that such cooperation relies on male preferences for unique and displayable rewards (trophies) out of competition.The first study uses a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate whether cooperation is sustained in a generosity competition with trophy rewards, and whether cooperation breaks down in the same environment with equally valuable but non-unique and non-displayable rewards. Further, it investigates whether males' competition for trophy rewards is the driving force for such differences while female competitiveness is modulated by trophies. The PIs hypothesize that reciprocity from female free-riders towards co-operators mitigates their negative emotion and consequently sustains cooperation.The second study extends the investigation from "winner in" to "loser out" mechanisms. Women are hypothesized to be more cooperative in "loser out" environments. The reason is that the inclination to win status competitions and obtain privileged access to females, an inclination captured by a "winner-in" mechanism, has contributed to male fitness throughout human history. However, female fitness is limited by material resources necessary for reproduction: only relatively disadvantaged females who fail to achieve threshold resource levels fail to achieve reproductive success. Thus, female preference to avoid becoming relatively disadvantaged may leave females sensitive to "loser-out" mechanisms.Broader Impact: Cooperation pervades human societies; it is an indispensible human activity. The project informs new directions in promoting pro-social activity in human groups, and has wide cross-disciplinary applications. In particular, this investigation lies at nexus of behavioral economics, evolutionary biology and anthropology, drawing from and extending the theory of costly signaling. It has immediate implications for literatures aimed at underlying factors responsible for observed gender differences in competitive inclinations that might partially explain contemporary gender wage gaps. The project opens new paths to promoting cooperation in human groups without sacrificing efficiency. The results could have an important impact in any domains where voluntary compliance matters, including relations between spouses, employers and employees, market transactions, and conformity to legal standards.

本研究探讨了在竞争性的社会困境中，进化而来的对可展示奖励的偏好如何调节男性和女性的慷慨。利他主义合作是人类社会不可或缺的，在发展机构以促进有利于社会的决定方面取得了很大进展。经济学家关注的是惩罚和奖励，但他们经常发现，奖励会挤出合作的内在动机，并在精神上影响效率。与此同时，进化生物学家早就认识到，即使没有正式的经济激励，以野生食物为生的群体通常也能有效地组织合作，尤其是食物共享。本研究以进化心理学为理论基础，假设这种合作依赖于男性在竞争中对独特的、可展示的奖励（奖杯）的偏好。第一项研究使用了一个受控的实验室实验，调查在有奖杯奖励的慷慨竞争中，合作是否持续，以及在有同等价值但非独特和不可展示的奖励的相同环境中，合作是否破裂。此外，它调查是否男性的竞争奖杯奖励是这种差异的驱动力，而女性的竞争是由奖杯调制。研究假设女性搭便车者对合作者的互惠行为减轻了她们的负面情绪，从而维持了合作。研究二将研究从“赢家进入”扩展到“输家退出”机制。女性被认为在“失败者”的环境中更合作。原因在于，在地位竞争中获胜并获得接近女性的特权的倾向，这种倾向被“赢家”机制所捕获，在整个人类历史上都有助于男性的健康。然而，女性健身是有限的物质资源繁殖所需的：只有相对弱势的女性谁没有达到阈值资源水平无法实现生殖成功。因此，女性避免处于相对不利地位的偏好可能会使女性对“失败者”机制敏感。更广泛的影响：合作遍及人类社会，是人类不可或缺的活动。该项目为促进人类群体的亲社会活动提供了新的方向，并具有广泛的跨学科应用。特别是，这项研究是在行为经济学，进化生物学和人类学的联系，借鉴和扩展了昂贵的信号理论。它有直接的影响，旨在文献的基本因素负责观察到的性别差异的竞争倾向，可能部分解释当代性别工资差距。该项目为促进人类群体的合作而不牺牲效率开辟了新的途径。研究结果可能对自愿遵守问题的任何领域产生重要影响，包括配偶、雇主和雇员之间的关系、市场交易和遵守法律的标准。