The evolution of social cohesion

People Involved

• Andrew Bell
• Simon Angus
• Will Ludington
• Paul Hooper
• Alenjandro Balbin

Concept

We often study the effect of certain social institutions, and sometimes look at transitions, but what effect does passed-on cultural institutions play in the evolution and formation of cohesive social institutions?

Proposition

Suppose that a set of agents have choices over the following

• within an institutional period: how to behave towards each other
• between institutional periods: which institution to have (and pass on?) to the next generation

Of interest is whether memory (cultural, historical, heritage) affects agents' long-term decisions about social institutions?

Research Questions follow:

• is there a stable (long-run) social institution that is selected?
• does this institutional structure have a path-dependance (i.e. must institutaion A then B then C preceed the selection and stabilisation of institution X)?
• do agents operate heterogeneosly within a period (e.g. old agents who have cultural knnowledge prefer institution X, but young agents, with shorter memories, or trust in passed-on heritage select institution Y?
• what scaling? do small vs. large population affect these decisions?
• what about a two-population model? do we see group selection occuring to promote a certain institution in both camps? or is there a stable complimentary institutional framework (e.g. E. vs. W. Germany)?

Approach

• Keep things simple
• construct a simple interaction game for the agents, causing the institutions to be also simple
  • (leave out voting methodologies, political interest etc.)

A possible model:

• a standard hunter-gatherer scenario under scarcity
• agents face a decision problem whether to cooperate the hunt or to act individually (stag-hunt style)
• for the coalitions: the success of any grouping is proportional to the number in the coalition (due to division of labour within the coalition, trust-based hunting methods)
• for the individuals: a minority game design (we are hunting) could lead to preferable outcomes (I didn't hunt where the large, noisy group hunted?)
• institutions:
  • a 'good' institution for cooperation: a transfer system (public good provision?) to all members of society, supports free-riders in the short-term, but does this survive in the long-run (over successive generations, since some agents remember when everyone had lack)
  • a targeted (progressive) taxation system: a transfer system specifically from the well-off top half to the bottom half (ranked in terms of reward from expended gathering effort)
  • no transfer system: you get (only) what you work for, no other transfers or public good provision
  • a consumption taxation regime: distribution based on discretionary welfare (so we would need a metabolism system for basic needs, and then a discretionary part for 'leisure')
  • public good provision through taxation: but only to the 'cultural memory fund' -- i.e. for libraries, books, plays, histories, langauge etc. that capture things about how times were in previous set-ups

Parameters:

• memory of each individual (how many previous instutional arrangements they remember)
• birth/death rates (how fast we turn over the population ('physical' memory)

Notes and thoughts

From Paul:

• Andrew introduced Ostrom's typology of institutional norms--mays, musts, and must nots--where each directive is accompanied by a promise of reward or punishment for compliance or non-compliance. 'Good' institutions presumably alter the fitness landscape of individual players to be more compatable with socially desirable outcomes (contribute to the public good, don't shirk, engage in low-cost or pro-social rather than disruptive forms of status competition, etc.).
• I wonder if the institutions that the players choose/develop/vote on between periods could be formulated using this framework, where the institution pairs a punishment/reward to any given individual behavior. The form of the punishment/reward would have to be specified by several variables.
  • Let's say the players are considering a punishment for not contributing to a public good. Is the size of the punishment inversely proportional to the amount contributed? What is the shape of that function? Or is there a fixed fine for contributions below a certain level?
• Any collective punishment or reward system will require resources for enforcement.
  • If players institute a punishment for shriking on a public good, would each be willing to contribute resources to fund the police that enforce it?
• The source of new institutions:
  • Can we somewhat randomly generate institutions, and see whether they're taken up by the players? Some institutions would be dumb (e.g. the more you contribute to the public good, the more you are punished), and others favorable compared to the original intitutionless setting.
  • OR, because there are so many ways an institution could be specified, we could generate a fixed number of institutions that we introduce and allow the players to consider.