A small amount of greed promotes social cohesion by providing a framework for cooperation, reports SFI External Professor Dirk Helbing, a sociologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Zurich, and collaborator Carlos Roca in Physorg.com.
If social cohesion leads to utopia, then cooperation should be helpful and greed should be detrimental, according to conventional wisdom. Social factors such as punishment, reputation, and future forecasts influence individuals’ social decisions, compelling people to be more cooperative and less self-serving, it is generally believed.
Helbing’s Public Goods Games-based model stripped away those influences on test subjects, forcing them to rely on past experience and self-interest to make social decisions.
He found that, even when completely isolated from the influence of others and considering only their individual self interest, test subjects tend to make decisions that lead to greater social cohesion among the group.
Read the Physorg.com article (July 21, 2011)
Read the PNAS paper (June 27, 2011)