Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
Posted 23 Aug 2013 / 2Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation “The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation”
Human beings are not always (or completely) engulfed in a war of tribe against tribe. In other words, we are not strictly “ethnocentric” in our cooperation: we are willing to cooperate with those not directly identified as our “in group”. This modeling study suggests that ethnocentric cooperation should dominate naively pluralistic (so-called “humanitarian”) cooperation, so something beyond the mechanisms explored in this model must be at play in human societies.
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Individual-based Models, Kin Selection
Human beings aren’t always involved in PD interactions, either. They are also not memory-less agents in a square lattice. Finally, the boundaries of in- and out- groups are very unintuitive, it is tempting to assume it is things like language, race, nation, etc but it can just as easily be any other social construct like party-affiliation, social rung, or more abstract blue vs. red.
I don’t think any conclusions should be (seriously) drawn from (just) single simulation studies. They should just shape what questions we ask, and how we make our reasoning more precise.