Why many people do not like whistleblowers
Une nouvelle étude donne une explication biologique (basé sur la théorie des jeux) pour le fait qu’il n’est pas évident pour les lanceurs d’alerte de dénoncer quand ça concerne l’organisation dans la quelle ils font partie ; en termes évolutionnaires il serait plus bénéfique de respecter (coopérer avec) les structures existantes plutôt que de les dénoncer.
▻http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/2014/12/16/whistleblowing
“It’s generally very difficult to maintain cooperation between individuals but you can unite people by believing in a common truth, for example maintaining a company culture."
“The dark side to this is that individuals who act on a piece of information that goes against this perceived common truth pay a reputational cost, even if their information is correct. An example of this is when whistleblowers are vilified by colleagues, even when the evidence is in their favour."
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“In circumstances where like-minded individuals work together, it is evolutionarily more beneficial for individuals to ‘toe the party line’.”
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“You can’t solve this problem by simply criminalising those who don’t speak up against their organisation when something is wrong - this just raises the stakes higher and makes it an even more stressful working culture in which to work.
“Instead organisations should try to lower the reputational cost to whistleblowers, acknowledging that this is a problem of human biology and introduce measures to make it easier to report problems rather than simply introducing criminal punishments to those who don’t have the courage to go against their biology.”
L’étude :
Value Homophily Benefits Cooperation but Motivates Employing Incorrect Social Information
Journal of Theoretical Biology
Paul Rauwolf, Dominic Mitchell, Joanna Bryson - University of Bath
▻http://opus.bath.ac.uk/42094/1/RauwolfMitchellBryson.pdf
Abstract
Individuals often judge others based on third-party gossip, rather than their own experience, despite the fact that gossip is error-prone. Here we seek to understand this observation in the context of the evolution of cooperation. If individuals are being judged on noisy social reputations rather than on merit, then agents might exploit this, eroding the sustainability of cooperation. We employ a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Donation game, which has been used to simulate the evolution of cooperation through indirect reciprocity.
First, we validate the proposition that adding homophily (the propensity to interact with others of similar beliefs) into a society increases the sustainability of cooperation. However, this creates an evolutionary conflict between the accurate signalling of ingroup status versus the veridical report of the behaviour of other agents.
We find that conditions exist where signalling ingroup status outweighs honesty as the best method to ultimately spread cooperation.