Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation

“The operational details of these learning mechanisms appear to have been 'designed' by natural selection to extract useful information from the social world—that is, from the minds of other individuals (Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Henrich and Gil-White, 2001; Henrich and Boyd, 1998).”

“Hence, cooperative personalities or individual differences in cooperative type have been almost entirely neglected in research on the evolution and stability of cooperation (Axelrod 1984; Trivers 1985; Alexander 1987; Dugatkin 1997; Hammerstein 2003; Henrich 2004; van Schaik & Kappeler 2006; Henrich & Henrich 2007), t…”

“Some (e.g., Henrich 2004) depend on cultural group selection.”

“Henrich (2004) directly challenged the assumption commonly built into these models of an a priori bias in favor of tag-marked cooperators and against defectors.”

“As it has extensively been shown to be the case of some socially-acquired characteristics of human beings that are better explained by group level analysis (Henrich 2004), the sole selection operating at the individual level can not serve to explain what exists and happens today.”

“However, though often conflated with its genetic cousin, the cultural group selection argument requires fewer and less strenuous situational preconditions and provides a very plausible mechanism for the selection and transmission of cooperative norms (Henrich, 2004).”

“Cooperation is a skill necessary to maintaining the group, both for food sharing and fostering more general social relationships with family and friends (Henrich, 2004).”

“In humans, competition between groups can take the form of warfare, demographic production, or more subtle forms in which individuals learn decisions and strategies by observing higher-payoff individuals—some of whom are from groups with more group beneficial institutions (Henrich 2004).”

“…does fall within my scope (Wade, 1978; Uyenoyama & Feldman, 1980; Wilson, 1983; Grafen, 1984; Nunney, 1985; Wade, 1985; Heisler & Damuth, 1987; Queller, 1992a; Dugatkin & Reeve, 1994; Soltis et al., 1995; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Henrich, 2004; Traulsen & Nowak, 2006; West et al., 2008; Leigh, 2010).”

“…explored at greater length elsewhere (Andersen 2004; Frank 1998; Hofbauer and Sigmund 1998; Pepper and Knudsen 2001; Price 1995; Knudsen 2002, 2004; Henrich 2004) and summarized in the Appendix below. when information is transferred, in processes where an entity develops, or as a result of…”

“The fact that participants tend to offer some amount, when the offering of nothing unambiguously maximizes their returns, has been presented as evidence that humans do not behave in ways that maximize wealth and have the capacity to act altruistically (Camerer, 2003; Henrich et al., 2004).”

“…to align with each other have evolved (and developed), group-level alignment (e.g., parochialism, common values and ways of doing things) can evolve, potentially as a result of pressures such as inter-group competition and cultural group-selection (Boyd and Richerson, 2002; Henrich, 2004).”

“- 14 Seventh, the application of Darwinian principles to the evolution of social entities opens up a further agenda by building a bridge with the rapidly-growing body of research on the evolution of social cooperation (Hammerstein, 2003; Henrich, 2004; Bowles and Gintis 2011).”

“This would make it advantageous, even as necessary for survival as it is for a displaying animal, for each person to broadcast the correct identity signals as a show of normative conformity (Henrich 2004a).”

“This is because in an uncertain environment when the determinants of success are not directly observable, often the best strategy is to copy the behavior of those that are successful (Alchian 1950, Henrich 2004).”

“This could serve to investigate the phenomenon of cultural group selection (Henrich, 2004; Purzycki et al., 2016).”

“50See, for example, Henrich (2004), Bowles and Gintis (2011), Chudek and Henrich (2011), and Young (2015).”

“…the evolution of prosocial preferences is linked to derived human traits, including the capacities that give rise to cumulative cultural evolution (Henrich, 2004) and group-level cooperation (Silk et al., 2005; Burkart, Fehr, Efferson, & van Schaik, 2007), in humans, but not our closest primate…”

“In the field, social learning and cultural transmission (learning from peers, teachers, parents) teach people what constitutes socially acceptable behavior and what gets punished (e.g., Henrich 2004).”

“JEL: O30, O40.”

“Culture alters an organism’s environment through specific cultural variants (ideas, concepts, or institutions) that have average fitness consequences for all members of the group that adopts such practices (Henrich 2004).”

“Evolutionary models of moral behaviour suggest that the survival and flourishment of altruistic agents depends especially on the effect of their local groups on their fitness (Henrich 2004; Manner and Gowdy 2010).”

“More precisely, some socially acquired characteristics of human beings (like the above-mentioned ‘‘strong reciprocity’’) are better explained by group-level analysis (Henrich, 2004).”

“Wilson, 2003) have also been suggested as explanations, although their explanatory power beyond other mechanisms continues to be debated (e.g. Gardner & Grafen, 2009; Henrich, 2004).”

“) than in the original public good dilemma (Boyd, Gintis, Bowles, & Richerson, 2003; Boyd & Richerson, 1992; Henrich, 2004; Henrich & Boyd, 2001; Sober & Wilson, 1998).”

“Henrich and Boyd (2001) and Henrich (2004) observe that conformism to norms that are costly to the individual is most likely to evolve in tandem with individually beneficial conformism.”

“Thus, biologically or culturally evolved moral norms tend toward payoff-maximizing rules that everyone would agree to (49).”

“Although there is ecological evidence of assortative matchmaking [33], it cannot explain cooperation in all taxa [17, 18, 25].”

“A version relevant to the study of organizations is referred to as “cultural group selection” (Henrich, 2004).”

“These mechanisms include prestige-bias (i.e. imitate actions of high prestige individuals) and frequency-dependent bias (i.e. imitate most common behavior) (Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Henrich and Gil-White, 2001; Henrich, 2004).”

“Another framework emphasizes how people learn norms, including norms to cooperate (Henrich, 2004).”

“This result seems to be at variance with the view that group-beneficial norms can spread rapidly as a result of cultural group selection when transmission follows these imitation schemes (Boyd and Richerson 2002; Boyd et al. 2003; Henrich 2004).”

“Not only is this claim implausible, based on what we know about the ancestral social environment (Fehr et al., 2002; Henrich, 2004), but it is undermined by our experimental results, which show that people are fully capable of discriminating information regarding genetic relatedness and potential…”

“Mulitlevel selection is more salient when there is more genetic variance between groups and when these groups are in direct competition with one another, allowing the benefits of being in an altruistic group to outweigh within-group costs of altruistic behavior (Price, 1970; Frank, 1998; Henrich, 2004).”

“Theories of morality suggest that norms are learned and upheld through positive (e.g., praise) or negative (i.e., punishment) reinforcement (Aronfreed, 1961; Fehr & Gächter, 2002; Henrich, 2004).”

“JEL classification:C0; C7; D7 Keywords:Social norms; Mathematical model; Cooperation; Group formation; Group dynamics; Homophily”

“It is very plausible that in addition to competition in which size alone confers survival advantage — so-called selection for large groups (see Henrich, 2004) — differences in cultural innovations or toolkits act as a secondary mechanism of selection among these groups.”

“Although there are many sophisticated models of cultural evolution (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich, 2004), it is rare for these models to explicitly simulate the geometric properties that define the social network structures of real human populations.”

“CLIMATE POLICY As mentioned by Gowdy (2004), the mainstream paradigm is the dominant standard among economists and their audience.1 It thus provides the theoretical background on which policymaking is based.”

“Differential between-group imitation, or imitative group selection, is one of three mechanisms of cultural group selection, along with differential between-group proliferation andmigration (Henrich, 2004).”

“Another example of a positive feedback loop involving human superorganismic traits is the coevolution of cooperative cultural norms and genes for cooperation (Henrich, 2004).”

“Thus, the long-term social 42 relationships based on kin selection and reciprocity that underlie cooperation in many 43 other animals, particularly other primates, appear to be insufficient to account for the 44 evolution of cooperation in humans [1-4].”

“…to be universal (Csibra & Gergely, 2009), there is also cross-cultural variation in the explicitness and frequency of overt pedagogical practices (Henrich, 2004; Whiten, Horner, & Marshall-Pescini, 2003), with more direct and formal teaching in Western societies than in traditional societies.”

“Keywords: Collective action; Public goods; Cultural group selection; Parochialism; Conditional cooperation”

“3 Which is the dominant theme of transaction cost based explanations of the “nature of the firm” (see Coase 1937; Williamson 1985). induced to work more than minimally, and, what is more, perhaps even with initiative and enthusiasm (see Simon 1991).”

“…has been proposed as the primary assimilation rule allowing high cultural relatedness to be maintained between groupmembers (Henrich and Boyd, 2001; Henrich, 2004), and favoring the evolution of culturally-inherited altruistic helping in large groups (Boyd and Richerson, 1982; Richerson and Boyd,…”

“Thus, there is value in synthesizing the theoretical (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Henrich 2004) and empirical literature (Campbell 1969; McElreath et al.”

“…& Maynes, 1998; Keser, 1996; Keser & VanWinden, 2000; Willinger & Ziegelmeyer, 1999) and small-scale societies (Fehr & Leibbrandt, 2011; Henrich, 2000; Henrich, 2004; Henrich et al., 2005; Lamba & Mace, 2011), remains a puzzle for evolutionary biologists (Alexander, 2006; Boyd & Richerson, 2009).”

“Furthermore, most previous work on the adaptive nature of culture has focused on group characteristics, such as cultural traits favoring group success (Henrich 2004; Soltis, Boyd, andRicherson 1995), thus largely neglecting individuals’ contributions to the adaptive process.”

“Within the literature about reciprocity, several authors describe the orientation of own behaviour with regard to certain reference groups with the terms ‘conditional cooperation’, ‘conformity’ or the ‘desire of social approval’ (Pretty and Ward, 2001; Fehr and Falk, 2002; Henrich, 2004).”

“The techno-cultural choices of these groups, for example in relation to a general evolution of human cognition and social interaction, could have been much more complex [65].”

“But the efficacy of these mechanisms declines substantially with increasing group size and higher coresidence with more distant relatives or, especially, unrelated individuals.(86,87) Promoting altruistic, cooperative behaviors in such circumstances requires a shift away from within-group selection mechanisms that ten…”

“Theories of normative conformity suggest that norm violators are punished simply for deviating from group norms, whether those deviations involve cooperating too little or too much (Henrich, 2004; Van Dijk et al., 2015).”

“…that greenbeard altruism may evolve if genetic altruists can recognize and cooperate preferentially with each other, so that there is a better-than-average chance that their altruism will benefit another genetic altruist, rather than a free rider (Dawkins, 1976; Hamilton, 1964; Henrich, 2004).”

“Evolutionary theories have focused on two major accounts to explain altruism among non-kin: reciprocity (e.g., Trivers, 1971) and cultural group selection (e.g., Henrich, 2004; Richerson and Boyd, 2005), with people acting more altruistically toward members of their ingroup.”

“Henrich (2004) notes that a purely genetic approach cannot explain the degree of pro-social behavior observed in humans.”

“As an alternative to reciprocity, the concept of conformity (cf. Henrich, 2004) has been used to explain conditional cooperation.”

“and Henrich, J. [2013]: ‘Culture–Gene Coevolution, Large Scale”

“His results have led others to reexamine theories of cooperation in animal and social systems, for example see research by Henrich, 2004 andWilson & Sober, 1994).”