Media release

From: The Royal Society

Clustering Drives Cooperation on Reputation Networks, All Else Fixed

Royal Society Open Science

Summary: One of our species’ superpowers is that we can organise ourselves into surprisingly large groups in a way that everyone pulls their weight, freeriding is at a minimum. We achieve this by the way of engaging in juicy gossip. All traditional societies, whether hunter-gatherers or farmers, monitor social norm violations via tracking reputation on the social network. It is this mechanism that falls apart with modernity: with smaller families and people moving into cities, the social network’s structure changes, making gossip less efficient in enforcing cooperation. This paper, intended for the interested non-mathematicians, shows the mathematical mechanics underlying the phenomenon.