A kin-selection model of fairness in heterogeneous populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans and other primates exhibit pro-social preferences for fairness. These preferences are thought to be reinforced by strong reciprocity, a policy that rewards fair actors and punishes unfair ones. Theories of fairness based on strong reciprocity have been criticized for overlooking the importance of individual differences in socially heterogeneous populations. Here, we explore the evolution of fairness in a heterogeneous population. We analyse the Ultimatum Game in cases where players' roles in the game are determined by their status. Importantly, our model allows for non-random pairing of players, and so we also explore the role played by kin selection in shaping fairness. Our kin-selection model shows that, when individuals condition their behaviour on their role in the game, fairness can be understood as either altruistic or spiteful. Altruistic fairness directs resources from less valuable members of a genetic lineage to more valuable members of the same lineage, whereas spiteful fairness keeps resources away from the competitors of the actor's high-value relatives. When individuals express fairness unconditionally it can be understood as altruistic or selfish. When it is altruistic, unconditional fairness again serves to direct resources to high-value members of genetic lineages. When it is selfish, unconditional fairness simply improves an individual's own standing. Overall, we expand kin-selection based explanations for fairness to include motivations other than spite. We show, therefore, that one need not invoke strong reciprocity to explain the advantage of fairness in heterogeneous populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".