Department of Political Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.
J R Soc Interface. 2022 Mar;19(188):20210725. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2021.0725. Epub 2022 Mar 23.
Economic, social and political inequality between different identity groups is an important contributor to violent conflicts within societies. To deepen our understanding of the underlying social dynamics, we develop a mathematical model describing cooperation and conflict in a society composed of multiple factions engaged in economic and political interactions. Our model predicts that growing economic and political inequality tends to lead to the collapse of cooperation between factions that were initially seeking to cooperate. Certain mechanisms can delay this process, including the decoupling of political and economic power through rule of law and allegiance to the state or dominant faction. Counterintuitively, anti-conformity (a social norm for independent action) can also stabilize society, by preventing initial defections from cooperation from cascading through society. However, the availability of certain material resources that can be acquired by the state without cooperation with other factions has the opposite effect. We test several of these predictions using a multivariate statistical analysis of data covering 75 countries worldwide. Using social unrest as a proxy for the breakdown of cooperation in society, we find support for many of the predictions from our theory.
不同身份群体之间的经济、社会和政治不平等是导致社会内部暴力冲突的一个重要因素。为了更深入地了解潜在的社会动态，我们开发了一个数学模型，描述了由多个参与经济和政治互动的派系组成的社会中的合作和冲突。我们的模型预测，经济和政治不平等的加剧往往会导致最初寻求合作的派系之间的合作崩溃。某些机制可以延缓这一过程，包括通过法治和对国家或主导派系的忠诚来实现政治和经济权力的分离。反直觉的是，反从众（独立行动的一种社会规范）也可以通过防止合作的最初叛逃在社会中蔓延来稳定社会。然而，国家无需与其他派系合作即可获得的某些物质资源则会产生相反的效果。我们使用对全球 75 个国家的数据进行的多元统计分析来检验其中的几个预测。我们使用社会动荡作为社会合作破裂的代理指标，发现我们的理论中有许多预测得到了支持。
