Abstract: Understanding the emergence of cooperation is one of the most significant challenges science faces today. Cooperation dilemmas occur at all scales and levels of complexity, from cells to global governance. Theoretical and experimental works have shown that status and reputations can provide solutions to the cooperation conundrum. These features are often framed in the context of indirect reciprocity, which constitutes one of the most elaborate mechanisms of cooperation discovered so far. By helping someone, individuals may increase their reputation, which can change the predisposition of others to help them in the future. The reputation of an individual depends, in turn, on the social norms that establish what is a good or bad action. Such norms are often so complex that the individual’s ability to follow subjective rules becomes important. In this seminar, I will discuss a simple toolkit capable of simulating and identifying the key pattern of the norms that promote cooperation, and those that do so at a minimum complexity. This combination of high cooperation and low complexity suggests that simple moral principles, and informal institutions based on reputations, can elicit cooperation even in complex environments. I will also discuss how the same toolkit — grounded on simulation of complex systems, dynamics of peer-influence and game theory — can be useful to model cooperation in more complex scenarios, such as behavioural dynamics in social networks and climate change agreements. 

Bio: Francisco C. Santos is an Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of IST, University of Lisbon (Portugal). He is interested in applying scientific computing and modelling tools to understand collective dynamics in social and life sciences. He has been working on problems related to the evolution of cooperation, the origins of social norms, network science, and environmental governance, among others. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.