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Published March 13, 2013 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Indirect reciprocity is sensitive to costs of information transfer

Abstract

How natural selection can promote cooperative or altruistic behavior is a fundamental question in biological and social sciences. One of the persuasive mechanisms is "indirect reciprocity," working through reputation: cooperative behavior can prevail because the behavior builds the donor's good reputation and then s/he receives some reciprocal benefits from someone else in the community. However, an important piece missed in the previous studies is that the reputation-building process requires substantial cognitive abilities such as communication skills, potentially causing a loss of biological fitness. Here, by mathematical analyses and individual-based computer simulations, we show that natural selection never favors indirect reciprocal cooperation in the presence of the cost of reputation building, regardless of the cost-to-benefit ratio of cooperation or moral assessment rules (social norms). Our results highlight the importance of considering the cost of high-level cognitive abilities in studies of the evolution of humans' and animals' social behavior.

Additional Information

© 2013 Nature Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike 3.0 Unported License. Received 3 January 2013; Accepted 25 February 2013; Published 13 March 2013. This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows, 2011–2013, #232648. Author contributions: S.S. and H.K. designed and performed the research; S.S. wrote the paper.

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Published - Suzuki_2013p1435.pdf

Supplemental Material - srep01435-s1.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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