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AbstractPrevious research suggests that it is difficult to maintain cooperation in a large society when there is a strong hierarchical structure. In this study, we implement online human experiments to study the effects of exogenous variation in a particular notion of hierarchy on cooperation and conflict within groups. We demonstrate how cooperation can be maintained when collective action is accompanied by dyadic conflicts whose outcome feeds back on the hierarchical rank of the contestants. We find that the majority of individuals take part in conflicts and that highly ranked individuals mostly cooperate and engage in conflicts as a way to punish noncooperators. As a consequence, stable hierarchical groups can arise and maintain high levels of cooperation. Our results are in agreement with the prediction of earlier theoretical models on hierarchical societies and are relevant to understanding the interplay of hierarchy, cooperation, and conflict.

The vast amount of research devoted to public goods games has shown that contributions may be dramatically affected by varying framing conditions. This is particularly relevant in the context of donations to charities and non-governmental organizations. Here, we design a multiple public goods experiment by introducing five types of funds, each differing in the fraction of the contribution that is donated to a charity. We found that people contribute more to public goods when the associated social donations are presented as indirect rather than as direct donations. At the same time, the fraction of the donations devoted to charity is not affected by the framing. We have also found that, on average, women contribute to public goods and donate to charity significantly more than men. These findings are of potential interest to the design of social investment tools, in particular for charities to ask for better institutional designs from policy makers. ; This work was partially supported by MINECO (Spain) and FEDER funds through grant no. FIS2017-87519-P (Y.M.) and FJCI-2016-28276 (A.A.); by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades/FEDER (Spain/UE) through grant no. PGC2018-098186-B-I00 (BASIC) (A.S. and J.C.); by Comunidad de Madrid under grant no. PRACTICO-CM and by Comunidad de Madrid/Universidad Carlos III de Madrid under grant no. CAVTIONS-CM-UC3M (A.S.); by Comunidad de Aragón (Spain) through grant no. E36-20R to FENOL (C.G.L. and Y.M.); by the EU through FET-Proactive Project MULTIPLEX (contract no. 317532, Y.M.) and FET-Proactive Project DOLFINS (contract no. 640772, C.G.L., Y.M. and A.S.), and by the Spanish State Research Agency and FEDER funds, through the María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711, S.M.) and under the PACSS grant no. (RTI2018-093732-B-C22, S.M.).