Doctoral Dissertation Research: Drivers of Cooperative Behavior in Situations of Conflict

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Humans learn about the reputations of people they have never met through a range of direct and indirect forms of communication, and these reputations help them choose new partners in cooperative scenarios. This doctoral dissertation research project investigates how people communicate reputational information, how reputation impacts decision-making, and what types of communication inhibit or enable utility in these associations.

Its findings shed light on the cultural norms that help develop social consensus thereby allowing for large-scale cooperation of many people. The results can help stakeholders develop effective solutions for cooperative dilemmas involving many entities such as resource preservation and climate change. Additionally, this project provides STEM research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students and improve science competency through public outreach events.

This project examines how reputation impacts cooperative decisions in situations of conflict. Reputations are transmitted through various forms of communicative interaction, but it is not well-understood how these reputations endure, by remaining reliable enough that people rely on them when making future decisions about cooperation. Using ethnography, surveys, vignettes, and an economic game, this study assesses how reputations are learned, the degree of agreement about an individual's reputation, and how perceptions of reputation impact interactions with other people.

Data is analyzed through social network analysis and Bayesian statistics to identify the level of agreement between participants and the scale of reputational information. Data from this project assesses the assumptions of theoretical models to evaluate the importance of reputation-based cooperation. Multiple disciplines stand to benefit through the content and social network analysis of reputation transmission as it provides insight into the various functions of reputational communication, including for ostracism, alliance building, norm enforcement, and establishing group boundaries.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.