Citation:
Pereda, M., Brañas-Garza, P., Rodríguez-Lara, I. y Sánchez, A. (2017). The emergence of altruism as a social norm. Scientific Reports, 7, 9684.
xmlui.dri2xhtml.METS-1.0.item-contributor-funder:
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España) European Commission
Sponsor:
We are thankful to the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their help in improving the manuscript. This work was partially supported by the EU through FET-Proactive Project DOLFINS (contract no. 640772, A.S.) and FET-Open Project IBSEN (contract no. 662725, A.S.), grants ECO2013-44879-R and ECO2016-75575-R from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain), grant FIS2015-64349-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and grant P12.SEJ.01436 from Junta de Andalucía (Spain).
Project:
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/640772 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/662725 Gobierno de España. ECO2013-44879-R Gobierno de España. ECO2016-75575-R Gobierno de España. FIS2015-64349-P
Expectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function. In the Dictator game (DG), people expect generous behavior from others even if they cannot enforce any sharing of the pie. Here we assExpectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function. In the Dictator game (DG), people expect generous behavior from others even if they cannot enforce any sharing of the pie. Here we assume that people donate following their expectations, and that they update their expectations after playing a DG by reinforcement learning to construct a model that explains the main experimental results in the DG. Full agreement with the experimental results is reached when some degree of mismatch between expectations and donations is added into the model. These results are robust against the presence of envious agents, but affected if we introduce selfish agents that do not update their expectations. Our results point to social norms being on the basis of the generous behavior observed in the DG and also to the wide applicability of reinforcement learning to explain many strategic interactions.[+][-]