Department of Mathematics, California State University, Northridge, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2013 Apr 23;8(4):e61458. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0061458. Print 2013.
While the evolution of cooperation has been widely studied, little attention has been devoted to adversarial settings wherein one actor can directly harm another. Recent theoretical work addresses this issue, introducing an adversarial game in which the emergence of cooperation is heavily reliant on the presence of "Informants," actors who defect at first-order by harming others, but who cooperate at second-order by punishing other defectors. We experimentally study this adversarial environment in the laboratory with human subjects to test whether Informants are indeed critical for the emergence of cooperation. We find in these experiments that, even more so than predicted by theory, Informants are crucial for the emergence and sustenance of a high cooperation state. A key lesson is that successfully reaching and maintaining a low defection society may require the cultivation of criminals who will also aid in the punishment of others.
虽然合作的进化已经被广泛研究，但在一方可以直接伤害另一方的对抗环境中，很少有人关注这个问题。最近的理论工作解决了这个问题，引入了一个对抗性游戏，在这个游戏中，合作的出现很大程度上依赖于“告密者”的存在，告密者在一阶时通过伤害他人而背叛，但在二阶时通过惩罚其他背叛者而合作。我们在实验室中用人类受试者来实验性地研究这个对抗性环境，以测试告密者是否确实对合作的出现至关重要。我们在这些实验中发现，告密者对于合作的出现和维持高合作状态比理论预测的更为关键。一个重要的教训是，成功地达到并维持低背叛社会可能需要培养罪犯，他们也将有助于惩罚他人。
