Visible inequality causes less cooperation and wealth?

In a social network like Linkedin, would you more likely to connect with people with higher social status than you or those with lower ones than you? If you are told your coworkers earned much less than you, would you like to collaborate with them for a project? A recent paper published in Nature provides a laboratory model for questions like these.

Economic inequality exist in most human societies, whereas human have strong preference for equalities. Nishi et al. asked what may determine the inequality and what is the consequence of inequality on wealth. They displayed a networked public goods game—

1. 1462 subjects were placed in groups with a average size of 17.21.

2. Each subject was connected to an average of 5.33 neighbors.

3. The subjects were initially assigned wealth (units) to be rich, poor, or non-rich-non-poor.

4. The subjects played a cooperation game lasting 10 rounds.

5. In each round, the subjects chose to cooperate or defect with each neighbor—cooperate by reducing 50 units from their own wealth to increase their neighbors' by 100 units each; defect by doing nothing to cause no cost and benefit.

6. After the choosing cooperation or defect, the subjects were informed their neighbors' choices, they can then decide to keep or break the connection with their neighbors.

7. Some of the groups were informed the wealth situations (rich, poor, non-rich-non-poor) before the game started.

What they found—

1. Visible wealth, relative to invisible wealth, increases the inequality when the subjects knows they are unequal in the beginning.

2. Invisible wealth causes more average-wealth increase than visible wealth does.

3. Visible wealth, relative to invisible wealth, lowers overall cooperation with neighbors.

4. If the wealth are visible, the new rich in the initial equal condition are more likely to cooperate, whereas the current rich in the initial unequal condition are more likely to defect.

5. The rich keeps rich, and the poor keeps poor.

What does it mean? It means concealing wealth may increase the cooperation and reduce the inequality in the society. And initial equality, relative to initial inequality, causes more wealth increase. Are these true in the real world? It may support some phenomenons like the one mentioned in the beginning, but the real world is complicated, and there are many other factors that may affect the results. At least, it's more difficult to conceal your wealth, and go back to the initial equality now than the hunter-gather time.