Evolution of cooperative social norms

Abstract: Evolutionary game theory explores how people act when strategies are not consciously chosen but intuitively learnt over time. In the past two decades, this approach has increasingly been used to explore the evolutionary dynamics of cooperative social norms. These norms regulate how people assess others’ actions, and how they act based on these assessments of each other. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the related literature of indirect reciprocity. In the second part, I will then discuss how incomplete information, errors, and misunderstandings render many social norms unstable. This part shows that depending on the social norm in place, noise tends to propagate: Once individuals have disagreements about which reputation to assign to a third party, these disagreements tend to spread. I will end the talk by discussing the role of empathy, gossip and institutions to maintain cooperative social norms.