The structure of multiplex networks predicts play in economic games and real-world cooperation
Curtis Atkisson, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

TL;DR
This study shows that the structure of multiplex social networks, specifically the overlap of ties across domains, predicts cooperative behavior in both experimental and real-world settings across different communities.
Contribution
It introduces the use of multiplex network overlap as a predictor of cooperation, linking social structure to cooperative behavior at individual and community levels.
Findings
Higher multiplex overlap predicts increased cooperation.
Individual and community overlap influence cooperative tendencies.
Multiplex network structure explains inconsistencies in cooperation studies.
Abstract
Explaining why humans cooperate in anonymous contexts is a major goal of human behavioral ecology, cultural evolution, and related fields. What predicts cooperation in anonymous contexts is inconsistent across populations, levels of analysis, and games. For instance, market integration is a key predictor across ethnolinguistic groups but has inconsistent predictive power at the individual level. We adapt an idea from 19th-century sociology: people in societies with greater overlap in ties across domains among community members (Durkheim's "mechanical" solidarity) will cooperate more with their network partners and less in anonymous contexts than people in societies with less overlap ("organic" solidarity). This hypothesis, which can be tested at the individual and community level, assumes that these two types of societies differ in the importance of keeping existing relationships as…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsEvolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
