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Barriers to Cooperation Aid Ideological Rigidity and Threaten Societal Collapse

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  • Marko Jusup
  • Tadasu Matsuo
  • Yoh Iwasa

Abstract

Understanding the factors that promote, disrupt, or shape the nature of cooperation is one of the main tasks of evolutionary biology. Here, we focus on attitudes and beliefs supportive of in-group favoritism and strict adherence to moral consensus, collectively known as ideological rigidity, that have been linked with both ends of the political spectrum. The presence among the political right and the left is likely to make ideological rigidity a major determinant of the political discourse with an important social function. To better understand this function, we equip the indirect reciprocity framework – widely used to explain evaluation-mediated social cooperation – with multiple stylized value systems, each corresponding to the different degree of ideological rigidity. By running game theoretical simulations, we observe the competitive evolution of these systems, map conditions that lead to more ideologically rigid societies, and identify potentially disastrous outcomes. In particular, we uncover that barriers to cooperation aid ideological rigidity. The society may even polarize to the extent where social parasites overrun the population and cause the complete collapse of the social structure. These results have implications for lawmakers globally, warning against restrictive or protectionist policies.Author Summary: Attitudes, beliefs, and resulting value systems may represent important motivational and decision-making factors that have strong impact on cooperation in a society. Accordingly, understanding the social function of value systems is a topic of great interest in evolutionary biology, but one where progress is made difficult by the sheer complexity of values-inspired behaviors. Here, we argue that considerable theoretical progress can be made within the indirect reciprocity framework. We show in the context of indirect reciprocity how to construct stylized value systems from a mathematically formalized notion of ideological rigidity. Our simulations indicate that politically imposed restrictions and protectionism favor the evolution of ideologically rigid value systems. The complete collapse of cooperation also arises as a possible evolutionary outcome.

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  • Marko Jusup & Tadasu Matsuo & Yoh Iwasa, 2014. "Barriers to Cooperation Aid Ideological Rigidity and Threaten Societal Collapse," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(5), pages 1-8, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pcbi00:1003618
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003618
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Lawson, Robert A. & Clark, J.R., 2010. "Examining the Hayek-Friedman hypothesis on economic and political freedom," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 74(3), pages 230-239, June.
    2. Greif, Avner, 1994. "Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(5), pages 912-950, October.
    3. Martin A. Nowak & Karl Sigmund, 2005. "Evolution of indirect reciprocity," Nature, Nature, vol. 437(7063), pages 1291-1298, October.
    4. Michihiro Kandori, 1992. "Social Norms and Community Enforcement," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 59(1), pages 63-80.
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    Cited by:

    1. Boris Podobnik & Marko Jusup & Dejan Kovac & H. E. Stanley, 2017. "Predicting the Rise of EU Right-Wing Populism in Response to Unbalanced Immigration," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2017, pages 1-12, August.
    2. Deng, Xinyang & Jiang, Wen & Wang, Zhen, 2019. "Zero-sum polymatrix games with link uncertainty: A Dempster-Shafer theory solution," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 340(C), pages 101-112.

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