This finding suggests that in a world where social information is more available, people may increasingly insulate themselves in communities with other like-minded individuals.
- Edoardo Gallo
People in a society are bound together by a set of connections – a social network. Cooperation between people in the network is essential for societies to prosper, and the question of what drives the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental one.
What we know about other people in a network informs how much we are willing to cooperate with them. By conducting a series of online experiments, researchers explored how two key areas of network knowledge effect cooperation in decision-making: what we know about the reputation and social connections of those around us.
In most social contexts, knowledge about others’ reputation – what we know about their previous actions – is limited to those we have immediate connections with: friends, neighbours and so on.
But the new study shows that if the reputation of everyone in a network is completely transparent – made common knowledge and visible to all – rather than limited to the individuals who are directly connected, the level of cooperation across the overall network almost doubles. The network also becomes denser and more clustered (so your connections tend to be connected with each other).
The researchers also tested how transparency of social connections in the group influences cooperation. On its own, common knowledge of social connections had little impact on overall levels of cooperation.
However, when the researchers combined transparency of social connections with transparency of everyone’s reputation, a community of the most cooperative formed. Members of the community actively removed links from less cooperative individuals and refused their proposals to reconnect.
Researchers found that belonging to the community of cooperators is profitable. Each interaction in the cooperative community is 23% more beneficial than the equivalent interaction in the less cooperative community.
The study is published in the journal PNAS, and was conducted by Cambridge and Oxford researchers.
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Image:Cooperation
Credit: Marina del Castell
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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