Internalizing cooperative norms in group-structured populations

The success of humans in spreading through all of Earth's ecosystems and transforming them at planetary scale is directly dependent on our capacity to cooperate in large groups and self-organize in complex social structures that sustain such cooperation. One of the main components of such large-scale cooperation is the human capacity and propensity for inventing and following social norms (Ostrom, 2000; Fehr and Schurtenberger, 2018). Social norms influence almost all aspects of human behavior, providing a grammar of society (Bicchieri, 2005, 2010) that constrains and enables different kinds of individual behaviors, coordinates collective behavior, and sustains cooperation in the face of conflicts of interests.