Lange Taylor Z, Waring Timothy M
Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA.
Ecology and Environmental Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA.
Evol Hum Sci. 2025 Feb 14;7:e12. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2025.8. eCollection 2025.
Evolutionary scientists argue that prosociality has been central to human ecological success. Theoretical models and behavioural experiments have found that prosociality, and cooperation in particular, is conditional and context dependent, that individuals vary in their propensity to cooperate, and that reciprocity stabilizes these behaviours within groups. Experimental findings have had limited validation with observations of behaviour in natural settings, especially in organizational contexts. Here, we report measurements of collective action, which show that reciprocity is abundant in organizations embedded in a cash economy. We study small 'food clubs', where members share bulk purchases and are considered to be heavily dependent on cooperation. We use high-resolution data on the economic interactions of 1,528 individuals across 35 clubs and over a combined 107 years of operation. We develop a network method to detect different directional and temporal forms of economic reciprocity, and statistically classify individual behavioural types akin to those in experiments. We find abundant direct reciprocity, supplemented by indirect reciprocity, and that members of most clubs can be identified as consistent reciprocators. This study provides initial observational evidence that economic reciprocity may be more abundant in real-world settings, sharpening the findings of the behavioural study of cooperation and contributing to the more naturalistic study of reciprocity and prosociality.
进化科学家认为，亲社会行为一直是人类在生态环境中取得成功的核心要素。理论模型和行为实验表明，亲社会行为，尤其是合作行为，是有条件的且依赖于具体情境，个体的合作倾向存在差异，并且互惠行为在群体中稳定了这些行为。实验结果在自然环境中的行为观察中，尤其是在组织环境中的验证有限。在此，我们报告了集体行动的测量结果，表明在现金经济环境中的组织里，互惠行为非常普遍。我们研究了小型“食品俱乐部”，其成员共享批量采购的食品，并且被认为高度依赖合作。我们使用了关于35个俱乐部中1528个人的经济互动的高分辨率数据，这些俱乐部的运营总时长超过107年。我们开发了一种网络方法来检测经济互惠的不同方向和时间形式，并在统计上对类似于实验中的个体行为类型进行分类。我们发现存在大量的直接互惠行为，并有间接互惠行为作为补充，而且大多数俱乐部的成员都可被认定为始终如一的互惠者。这项研究提供了初步的观察证据，表明经济互惠在现实世界环境中可能更为普遍，强化了合作行为研究的结果，并有助于对互惠和亲社会行为进行更贴近自然的研究。
