Comment by woleium
3 years ago
There was a study done on a tribe of wild monkeys where mutual grooming to remove ticks/fleas/lice happened. Some monkeys 'cheated' and didn't pay forwards the grooming they received. The study concluded that as long as cheaters were less than 5% of the population then mutual grooming continued. when the number of cheats exceeded 5% the system broke down and no mutual grooming happened for some time.
It seems that a society can bear a certain amount of cheating before the system breaks down, a 'tipping point' of sorts. As long as we keep the cheating below the tipping point, the game continues, which is after all the most important aspect, I think.
I'm surprised the grooming monkeys didn't retaliate by refusing to groom the shirkers.
Maybe they didn't know. It seems to me like it's not "you scratch mine, I'll scratch yours" but more like "we all scratch each others."
Like the whole troop owes one groom per day. But nobody can pinpoint who was the shirker.
There surely is a game theory model for this.