Research from a team led by Joshua Plotkin, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor of the Natural Sciences in the School of Arts & Sciences, cautions that sometimes working together can actually spur inequality.
2 min. read
Encouraging people to contribute to a common good can have a surprising drawback: a risk that rewards become concentrated among a smaller group, putting the rest at a disadvantage. Put more simply, “equality and cooperation are often in conflict,” says Joshua Plotkin, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor of the Natural Sciences in the School of Arts & Sciences.
Plotkin, an evolutionary biologist and applied mathematician, has spent years studying cooperation. In a study published in Nature, he and colleagues developed a theoretical analysis showing that cooperation tends to benefit the more well-connected. The findings have implications for everything from how scientific papers credit authors to wide-scale efforts combating climate change.
Such information, according to Plotkin, could be particularly valuable for lawmakers and other officials who are able to drive and determine resource allocation as they stimulate collective gains—benefits or profits achieved by a group rather than by individuals. “The way a society chooses to divide collective gains can boost cooperation precisely by concentrating wealth,” he says. “So, policymakers must weigh the value of cooperation against inequality that comes with it.”
Per the paper’s findings, Plotkin says that the “allocation rule”—a standard term in the field for distributing the rewards from cooperation—can shape how willing people are to cooperate in a venture to begin with, and how lopsided the eventual gains become.
Plotkin’s lab uses mathematics to study the spread of behaviors and strategies through populations. To analyze cooperation and grasp the spread of social behavior in a population, his team adapted concepts and calculations originally used for studying the spread of genes.
“What’s new here is that we treat cooperation not as the finish line but as a starting point: Once it takes hold, what does this mean for the distribution of welfare?” Plotkin asks. “That connects evolutionary dynamics to questions traditionally studied by economics and the social sciences, such as inequality and the design of institutions.”
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