Policy and guideline proposals for ethical artificial intelligence research have proliferated in recent years. These are supposed to guide the socially-responsible development of AI for a common good. However, there typically exist incentives for non-cooperation ; and, these proposals often lack effective mechanisms to enforce their own normative claims. The situation just described constitutes a social dilemma—namely, a situation where no one has an individual incentive to cooperate, though mutual cooperation would lead to the best outcome for all involved. In (...) this paper, we use stochastic evolutionary game dynamics to model this social dilemma in the context of the ethical development of artificial intelligence. This formalism allows us to isolate variables that may be intervened upon, thus providing actionable suggestions for increased cooperation amongst numerous stakeholders in AI. Our results show how stochastic effects can help make cooperation viable in such a scenario. They suggest that coordination for a common good should be attempted in smaller groups in which the cost of cooperation is low, and the perceived risk of failure is high. This provides insight into the conditions under which we should expect such ethics proposals to be successful with regard to their scope, scale, and content. (shrink)

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice underradical uncertainty– situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people usenarratives– structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships – rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According to CNT, (...) narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels “right” to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences. (shrink)

The study explores the impact of robots’ emotional displays on people’s tendency to cooperate with a robot opponent in prisoner’s dilemma games. Participants played iterated prisoner’s dilemma games with a non-expressive robot (as a measure of cooperative baseline), followed by an angry, and a sad robot, in turn. Based on the Emotion as Social Information model, we expected participants with higher cooperative predispositions to cooperate less when a robot displayed anger, and cooperate more when the robot displayed sadness. Contrarily, according (...) to this model, participants with lower cooperative predispositions should cooperate more with an angry robot and less with a sad robot. The results of 60 participants failed to support the predictions. Only the participants’ cooperative predispositions significantly predicted their cooperative tendencies during gameplay. Participants who cooperated more in the baseline measure also cooperated more with the robots displaying sadness and anger. In exploratory analyses, we found that participants who accurately recognised the robots’ sad and angry displays tended to cooperate less with them overall. The study highlights the impact of personal factors in human–robot cooperation, and how these factors might surpass the influence of bottom-up emotional displays by the robots in the present experimental scenario. (shrink)

The fearful ape hypothesis (FAH) presents an evolutionary-developmental framework stipulating that in the context of cooperative caregiving, unique to human great ape group life, heightened fearfulness was adaptive. This is because from early in human ontogeny fearfulness expressed and perceived enhanced care-based responding and cooperation with mothers and others. This response extends and refines the FAH by incorporating the commentaries' suggestions and additional lines of empirical work, providing a more comprehensive and nuanced version of the FAH. Specifically, it encourages and (...) hopes to inspire cross-species and cross-cultural, longitudinal work elucidating evolutionary and developmental functions of fear in context. Beyond fear, it can be seen as a call for an evolutionary-developmental approach to affective science. (shrink)

The core of human cooperation is people's ability to perform joint actions. Frequently, this requires effectively decomposing a joint task into individual subtasks, for example, when jointly shopping at the market to buy food. Surprisingly, little is known about how collaborators balance the costs of establishing a joint strategy for such decompositions and its expected benefits for a joint goal. We created a new online task that required pairs of randomly matched participants to jointly collect colored items. We then systematically (...) varied the cognitive costs and benefits of applying a color‐splitting strategy. The results showed that pairs adopted a color‐splitting strategy more often when necessary to lower cognitive costs. However, once the strategy was jointly adopted, it continued to be used even when the cost–benefits changed. Our results provide first insights on how people decompose joint tasks into individual components and how decomposition strategies may evolve into conventions. (shrink)

Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: It must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based “purity” concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of (...) moral cognition. It emerges in response to a key feature of cooperation, namely that cooperation is (ultimately) a long-term strategy, requiring (proximately) the self-control of appetites for immediate gratification. Puritanical moralizations condemn behaviors which, although inherently harmless, are perceived as indirectly facilitating uncooperative behaviors, by impairing the self-control required to refrain from cheating. Drinking, drugs, immodest clothing, and unruly music and dance are condemned as stimulating short-term impulses, thus facilitating uncooperative behaviors (e.g., violence, adultery, free-riding). Overindulgence in harmless bodily pleasures (e.g., masturbation, gluttony) is perceived as making people slave to their urges, thus altering abilities to resist future antisocial temptations. Daily self-discipline, ascetic temperance, and pious ritual observance are perceived as cultivating the self-control required to honor prosocial obligations. We review psychological, historical, and ethnographic evidence supporting this account. We use this theory to explain the fall of puritanism in western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, and discuss the cultural evolution of puritanical norms. Explaining puritanical norms does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation in our models of the moral mind. (shrink)

Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...) have emerged, but will especially provide the reader with a first orientation in the abundant literature on human cooperation. (shrink)

Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...) have emerged, but will especially provide the reader with a first orientation in the abundant literature on human cooperation. (shrink)

We examined how people think about how things could have turned out differently after they made a decision to cooperate or not in three social interactions: the Prisoner’s dilemma (Experiment 1), the Stag Hunt dilemma (Experiment 2), and the Chicken game (Experiment 3). We found that participants who took part in the game imagined the outcome would have been different if a different decision had been made by the other player, not themselves; they did so whether the outcome was good (...) or bad for them, their own choice had been to cooperate or not, and the other player’s choice had been to cooperate or not. Participants who only read about a fictional protagonist’s game imagined changes outside the protagonist’s control (such as the other player’s decision) after a good outcome but within the protagonist’s control (such as the protagonist’s decision) after a bad outcome. The implications for theories of counterfactual thinking and moral decision-making are discussed. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive overview of my recent theoretical work that aims to explain some of the more puzzling properties of life and mind, in particular agency, goal-directedness and consciousness. It contains published papers as well as new material. Table of contents: Preface - PART I: GROUNDWORK - 1. Introduction - 2. The basic mechanism - 3. Inclusive and extensive fitness - 4. Components of F and X - 5. The consequences: a preview - PART II: LIFE - 6. (...) What qualifies as life? - 7. Biological meaning - 8. Biological functions - PART III: MIND - 9. Minimal agency, goal-directedness and value - 10. Intentionality and meaning - 11. Language - 12. Consciousness - 13. The human self - PART IV: PHILOSOPHY - 14. Strong emergence - 15. The real, the true and the good - 16. Philosophical problems of consciousness - Epilogue - Appendix A: Summaries of computational simulations - Appendix B: Examples of minimal intentionality - References. -/- . (shrink)

Altruism is embedded in our biology and in our culture. We offer our bus seats to the disabled and elderly, give directions to disoriented tourists, and donate a portion of our income charity. Yet for all the good it does, there are deep problems with altruism as it is practiced today. Nearly all of us, when asked, will say that we care about practicing altruism in a way that effectively improves the lives of others. Almost none of us, when asked, (...) can honestly say that we have made a serious effort to ensure that we are practicing altruism in a way that effectively improves the lives of others. Disparities like these are indicative of flaws in our cognitive architecture - biases which ensure that the traditional practice of altruism is incongruous with our own values. This disconnect between our values and our actions causes our altruistic efforts to help fewer people to a lesser extent than they otherwise could. I argue that traditional altruism is in need of reformation and defend a social and philosophical movement aimed at achieving this reformation known as effective altruism. The reason effective altruism is such a promising alternative to traditional altruism is its application of economic thinking to the realm of altruism and morality. An economist’s mentality is, I suggest, a necessary instrument for bridging the gap between our values and our actions, allowing us to practice altruism in a way that more effectively improves the lives of others. (shrink)

In this paper, we evaluate the proposal that a central function of commitments within joint action is to reduce various kinds of uncertainty, and that this accounts for the prevalence of commitments in joint action. While this idea is prima facie attractive, we argue that it faces two serious problems. First, commitments can only reduce uncertainty if they are credible, and accounting for the credibility of commitments proves not to be straightforward. Second, there are many other ways in which uncertainty (...) is commonly reduced within joint actions, which raises the possibility that commitments may be superfluous. Nevertheless, we argue that the existence of these alternative uncertainty reduction processes does not make commitments superfluous after all but, rather, helps to explain how commitments may contribute in various ways to uncertainty reduction. (shrink)

The present study is a differential study that describes the nature of the relationship between cooperation and altruistic behavior in a sample of gifted adolescents in three universities in Egypt and Kuwait University. It also identified the differences between males/females, and senior students/junior students in both cooperation and altruism. A total of 237 gifted adolescents—with average age 21.3 ± SD 2.6 years—from three Egyptian universities: Alexandria University, Sadat Academy for Management Sciences, and Suez University, and Kuwait University, were involved in (...) this study. Measures used in the study include the Scales for Rating the Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students, Generative Altruism Scale, and The Cooperative/Competitive Strategy Scale. Results revealed that there is a significant positive relationship between altruism and cooperation among gifted adolescents. Also, findings show that there are statistically significant differences between males and females in both altruism and cooperation. In addition, there are differences statistically significant between senior students and junior students in both altruism and cooperation in favor of senior students. It is recommended that altruism and cooperation intervention-based programs should be designed to increase the adaptive behaviors of adolescents. (shrink)

Gossip is ubiquitous. Gossip allows important rules to be clarified and reinforced, and it allows individuals to keep track of their social networks while strengthening their bonds to the group. The purpose of this study is to decipher the nature of gossip and how it relates to friendship connections. To measure how gossip relates to friendship, participants from men’s and women’s collegiate competitive rowing teams noted their friendship connections and their tendencies to gossip about each of their teammates. Using social (...) network analysis, we found that the crew members’ friend group connectedness significantly correlated with their positive and negative gossip network involvement. Higher connectedness among friends was associated with less involvement in spreading negative gossip and/or being a target of negative gossip. More central connectedness to the friend group was associated with more involvement in spreading positive gossip and/or being a target of positive gossip. These results suggest that the spread of both positive and negative gossip may influence and be influenced by friendship connections in a social network. (shrink)

The paper presents a novel view of social norms that reflects the importance of different agent types, their specific motivations and roles. How one identifies with a role and behavioral options available to the agent is crucial for the sustainability of the social norms. The analysis of a simple case of social norm is suggested as a default model for analysis, and then the classification of subjects, enforcers, and audience is introduced. This triangular typology of agents is extended by introducing (...) a network of interlocking patterns underlying social behavior. Lastly, the paper describes two categories of transgressions based on misidentification. (shrink)

Previous studies on whether punishers are rewarded by reputational gains have yielded conflicting results. Some studies have argued that punitive behaviors potentially result in a positive evaluation, while others have found the opposite. This study aims to clarify the conditions that lead to the positive evaluation of costly punishment. Study 1 utilized one-round and repeated public goods game situations and manipulated decision time for participants’ punitive behavior toward the non-cooperative person in the situation. We also asked participants to report their (...) impression evaluations of punitive behavior toward non-cooperative people. Moreover, utilizing the second- and third-party punishment games, Study 2 manipulated the decision time of participants’ punitive behavior toward the self-interested person and asked them to evaluate the punitive behavior. The results showed that those who punished intuitively were not likely to be evaluated positively. However, punishers were rewarded when the decision to punish was made after deliberation or made by those who were not direct victims. These findings extend previous research on the evaluation of punitive behavior and reveal that deliberative punishment is evaluated positively occasionally. (shrink)

In this paper, we evaluate the proposal that a central function of commitments within joint action is to reduce various kinds of uncertainty, and that this accounts for the prevalence of commitments in joint action. While this idea is prima facie attractive, we argue that it faces two serious problems. First, commitments can only reduce uncertainty if they are credible, and accounting for the credibility of commitments proves not to be straightforward. Second, there are many other ways in which uncertainty (...) is commonly reduced within joint actions, which raises the possibility that commitments may be superfluous. Nevertheless, we argue that the existence of these alternative uncertainty reduction processes does not make commitments superfluous after all but, rather, helps to explain how commitments may contribute in various ways to uncertainty reduction. (shrink)

The experience of emotion has a powerful influence on daily-life decision making. Following Plato’s description of emotion and reason as two horses pulling us in opposite directions, modern dual-system models of decision making endorse the antagonism between reason and emotion. Decision making is perceived as the competition between an emotion system that is automatic but prone to error and a reason system that is slow but rational. The reason system (in “the head”) reins in our impulses (from “the heart) and (...) overrides our snap judgments. However, from Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, emotion is adaptive, guiding us to make sound decisions in uncertainty. In this review, we provide a new model, called “The interactive influence model of emotion & cognition”, to elaborate the relationship of emotion and reason in decision making. Specifically, in our model, we identify factors that determine when emotions override reason and delineate the type of contexts in which emotions help or hurt decision making. We then illustrate how cognition modulates emotion and how they cooperate to affect decision making. (shrink)

We consider an environment where players are involved in a public goods game and must decide repeatedly whether to make an individual contribution or not. However, players lack strategically relevant information about the game and about the other players in the population. The resulting behavior of players is completely uncoupled from such information, and the individual strategy adjustment dynamics are driven only by reinforcement feedbacks from each player's own past. We show that the resulting “directional learning” is sufficient to explain (...) cooperative deviations away from the Nash equilibrium. We introduce the concept of k–strong equilibria, which nest both the Nash equilibrium and the Aumann-strong equilibrium as two special cases, and we show that, together with the parameters of the learning model, the maximal k–strength of equilibrium determines the stationary distribution. The provisioning of public goods can be secured even under adverse conditions, as long as players are sufficiently responsive to the changes in their own payoffs and adjust their actions accordingly. Substantial levels of public cooperation can thus be explained without arguments involving selflessness or social preferences, solely on the basis of uncoordinated directional learning. (shrink)

Pro-social behaviors are voluntary behaviors that benefit other people or society as a whole, such as charitable donations, cooperation, trust, altruistic punishment, and fairness. These behaviors have been widely described through non self-interest decision-making in behavioral experimental studies and are thought to be increased by social preference motives. Importantly, recent studies using a combination of neuroimaging and brain stimulation, designed to reveal the neural mechanisms of pro-social behaviors, have found that a wide range of brain areas, specifically the prefrontal cortex, (...) anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala, are correlated or causally related with pro-social behaviors. In this review, we summarize the research on the neural basis of various kinds of pro-social behaviors and describe a common shared neural circuitry of these pro-social behaviors. We introduce several general ways in which experimental economics and neuroscience can be combined to develop important contributions to understanding social decision-making and pro-social behaviors. Future research should attempt to explore the neural circuitry between the frontal lobes and deeper brain areas. (shrink)

Strong reciprocity has recently been subject to heated debate. In this debate, the “West camp” :231–262, 2011), which is critical of the case for SR, and the “Laland camp” :1512–1516, 2011, Biol Philos 28:719–745, 2013), which is sympathetic to the case of SR, seem to take diametrically opposed positions. The West camp criticizes advocates of SR for conflating proximate and ultimate causation. SR is said to be a proximate mechanism that is put forward by its advocates as an ultimate explanation (...) of human cooperation. The West camp thus accuses advocates of SR for not heeding Mayr’s original distinction between ultimate and proximate causation. The Laland camp praises advocates of SR for revising Mayr’s distinction. Advocates of SR are said to replace Mayr’s uni-directional view on the relation between ultimate and proximate causes by the bi-directional one of reciprocal causation. The paper argues that both the West camp and the Laland camp misrepresent what advocates of SR are up to. The West camp is right that SR is a proximate cause of human cooperation. But rather than putting forward SR as an ultimate explanation, as the West camp argues, advocates of SR believe that SR itself is in need of ultimate explanation. Advocates of SR tend to take gene-culture co-evolutionary theory as the correct meta-theoretical framework for advancing ultimate explanations of SR. Appearances notwithstanding, gene-culture coevolutionary theory does not imply Laland et al.’s notion of reciprocal causation. “Reciprocal causation” suggests that proximate and ultimate causes interact simultaneously, while advocates of SR assume that they interact sequentially. I end by arguing that the best way to understand the debate is by disambiguating Mayr’s ultimate-proximate distinction. I propose to reserve “ultimate” and “proximate” for different sorts of explanations, and to use other terms for distinguishing different kinds of causes and different parts of the total causal chain producing behavior. (shrink)

Image scoring sustains cooperation in the repeated two-player prisoner’s dilemma through indirect reciprocity, even though defection is the uniquely dominant selfish behaviour in the one-shot game. Many real-world dilemma situations, however, firstly, take place in groups and, secondly, lack the necessary transparency to inform subjects reliably of others’ individual past actions. Instead, there is revelation of information regarding groups, which allows for ‘group scoring’ but not for image scoring. Here, we study how sensitive the positive results related to image scoring (...) are to information based on group scoring. We combine analytic results and computer simulations to specify the conditions for the emergence of cooperation. We show that under pure group scoring, that is, under the complete absence of image-scoring information, cooperation is unsustainable. Away from this extreme case, however, the necessary degree of image scoring relative to group scoring depends on the population size and is generally very small. We thus conclude that the positive results based on image scoring apply to a much broader range of informational settings that are relevant in the real world than previously assumed. (shrink)

Moral judgment is a complex cognitive process that partly depends upon social and individual cultural values. There have been various efforts to categorize different aspects of moral judgment, but most studies depend upon rare dilemmas. We recruited 25 subjects from Tehran, Iran, to rate 150 everyday moral scenarios developed by Knutson et al. Using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), we observed that the same moral dimensions (except socialness dimension) were driven by the same moral cognitive factors (norm violation, intention, and social (...) affect) in Iranian vs. American studies. However, there were minor differences in the factor loadings between the two cultures. Furthermore, based on the EFA results, we developed a short form of the questionnaire by removing eleven of the fifteen scenarios from each of the ten categories. These results could be used in further studies to better understand the similarities and differences in moral judgment in everyday interactions across different cultures. (shrink)