Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Inequality in wealth is a pressing concern in many contempo-rary societies, where it has been show to co-occur with polit-ical polarization and policy volatility, however its causes areunclear. Here we demonstrate in a simple model where socialbehavior spreads through learning that inequality can covaryreliably with other cooperative behavior, despite a lack of ex-ogenous cause or deliberate coordination. In the context ofsimulated cultural evolution selecting for trust and cooperativeexchange, we find both cooperation and inequality to be moreprevalent in contexts where the same agents play both the rolesof the trusting investor and the trusted investee, in contrast tothe condition where these roles are divided between disjointpopulations. Cooperation is more likely in contexts of hightransparency about potential partners and with a high amountof partner choice; while inequality is more likely with highinformation but no choice in partners for those that want to in-vest. While not yet a full model of contemporary society, ourapproach holds promise for examining the causality and socialcontexts underlying shifts in income inequality.