Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85329
Title: Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites
Authors: Gallo, Edoardo
Riyanto, Yohanes E.
Teh, Tat-How
Roy, Nilanjan
Keywords: Human Behaviour
Mathematics And Computing
Social sciences::Economic development
Issue Date: 2019
Source: Gallo, E., Riyanto, Y. E., Teh, T.-H., & Roy, N. (2019). Strong links promote the emergence of cooperative elites. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 10857-. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-47278-2
Series/Report no.: Scientific Reports
Abstract: The maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for the prosperity of human societies. Empirical studies show that high cooperation is frequently associated with the presence of strong social ties, but they are silent on whether a causal mechanism exists, how it operates, and what features of the social environment are conducive to its emergence. Here we show experimentally that strong ties increase cooperation and welfare by enabling the emergence of a close-knit and strongly bound cooperative elite. Crucially, this cooperative elite is more prevalent in social environments characterized by a large payoff difference between weak and strong ties, and no gradation in the process of strengthening a tie. These features allow cooperative individuals to adopt an all or nothing strategy to tie strengthening based on the well-known mechanism of direct reciprocity: participants become very selective by forming strong ties only with other cooperative individuals and severing ties with everyone else. Once formed, these strong ties are persistent and enhance cooperation. A dichotomous society emerges with cooperators prospering in a close-knit, strongly bound elite, and defectors earning low payoffs in a weakly connected periphery. Methodologically, our set-up provides a framework to investigate the role of the strength of ties in an experimental setting.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85329
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/49795
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-47278-2
Schools: School of Social Sciences 
Rights: © 2019 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Fulltext Permission: open
Fulltext Availability: With Fulltext
Appears in Collections:SSS Journal Articles

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