May 3rd, 2007

3 Necessary Conditions for Human Cooperation

In The Evolution of Cooperation, written in 1984!, Robert Axelrod suggests there are three necessary conditions for people to cooperate with each other.

A likelihood of meeting in the future
If people don’t think they’ll meet again in the future, there are no repercussions for not cooperating. Threats of not cooperating are of no use. People will act selfish if there is no future to the relationship. Therefore, the knowledge of future meetings changes our behavior because we feel some level of impending accountability for our actions.
An ability to identify each other
Identity is really important for cooperation because it allows us to know who we’re dealing with. If people can’t identify who they’re dealing with, then they can’t hold that person accountable. This doesn’t mean that we have to know everything about the person, like their address and where they live, it means that they are identified as a person to the system they’re in and the people they’re dealing with.
A record of past behavior
We have learned to assume that the best way to judge future behavior is by looking at past behavior. Thus having a positive record of behavior leads to cooperation. eBay’s seller ratings are a great example of this in action. Sellers accumulate status over time as they do business on the site. Sellers who have a rich transaction history with a high percentage of positive transactions are much more likely to be successful than those with no history.

Design accordingly.

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Comments ( 11 Responses so far )

1. Jason on May 3rd, 2007 (Comment) #

Thanks for that. I would add to your first point that location and proximity are essential for it to work. Just the possibility of meeting due to those two variables gets you one step closer.

2. helge on May 3rd, 2007 (Comment) #

Manual trackback (in German): Bloggen ist gut fürs Geschäft

3. Suz on May 3rd, 2007 (Comment) #

Interesting - however I am not sure about the aspect of selfishness. Do you think that people per se lack any intrinsic motivation to cooperate?

4. Stuart Church on May 3rd, 2007 (Comment) #

More recently, there have been some really interesting extensions of Axelrod’s theories. For example, it turns out that cooperation can evolve readily when a “raising the stakes” strategy is adopted (there’s a Nature paper (PDF, 287K) explaining this). i.e. people only invest a little to start with, but if their help is reciprocated, will invest more in a later interaction (and invest even more after that if subsequent actions are reciprocated). I think that this has some major implications for our understanding of customer/user relationships.

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5. Michael R. Bernstein on May 8th, 2007 (Comment) #

#2 is incomplete, because unless you can also recognize people when they don’t want to be (not just identify them when they do), a pseudonymous assumed identity’s accumulated ‘record of past behavior’ can all too easily be ‘cashed out’.

In real life, it takes some effort to avoid casual recognition, so con-artists aren’t too common. Online, we see this capability popping up as various forms of reverse-DNS and IP-banning, but these are still mostly just used for garden-variety comment-spam elimination.

Astroturfing in particular is rampant in online forums with commercially attractive demographics, but most don’t do very much to combat it.

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3 Necessary Conditions for Human Cooperation

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