Around the world, people engage in practices that involve self-inflicted pain and apparently wasted resources, such as various religious rituals. Previous research suggests that these practices reliably communicate commitment to group cooperative norms and that benefits from increasing cooperation offset the cost of these practices.
Using a Public Goods Game, the research team shows that cooperative participants are willing to waste part of their monetary endowment to signal their intentions, and as a result, contribute more to a common group pool. By understanding factors affecting the reliability of cooperative communication, this study may help us appreciate the cooperative peculiarity of humankind.
You can find the paper here:
Martin Lang received the Czech National Foundation’s Junior Star grant with his project titled Computing Religious Devotion: How Reinforcing Supernatural Beliefs Affects Normative Models in the Mind.
The vice-rector for Research and Doctoral Studies at Masaryk University has awarded two LEVYNA graduates - Dan Řezníček and Radim Chvaja with a price for excellent results during their Ph.D. studies.
