Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert

• Ph.D. University of Cambridge
• Professor (Full) at Universidad del Desarrollo

We develop an endogenous fertility model of social strati…cation with two hereditary classes: a warrior elite and a peasantry. Our model shows that the extra cost warriors must incur to raise their children and to equip them for war is the key determinant of (1) the relative sizes of both classes, and (2) the warriors'economic privileges in terms o...

We model the dynamic effects of external enforcement on the exploitation of a common pool resource. Fitting our model to experimental data we find that institutions influence social preferences. We solve two puzzles in the data: the increase and later erosion of cooperation when commoners vote against the imposition of a fine, and the high deterren...

We model the coevolution of behavioral strategies and social learning rules in the context of a cooperative dilemma, a situation in which individuals must decide whether or not to subordinate their own interests to those of the group. There are two learning rules in our model, conformism and payoff-dependent imitation, which evolve by natural selec...

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed people's lives. It had consequences at the individual and social level. The behavioral immune system predicts that when faced with the risk of contagion from pathogens, people tend to reduce their sociality, especially sociosexuality. We examine this prediction by evaluating decreases in the pa...

During childhood, schools are a crucial environment for social interactions, making them ideal forevaluating the inclusion of children with special educational needs (SEN). Children with AutismSpectrum Disorder (ASD) often face challenges in peer relationships, yet how this condition impactsspecific social dynamics and school coexistence is not wel...

Evidence is abundant that evolution by selection has produced sex differences in the design of adaptations to solve the problems surrounding reproduction. A prime example is the design of human jealousy, which research suggests is triggered by distinct evoking acts that are specific challenges for women and men in their exclusive reproductive bond....

Cooperation and bullying have a subtle yet important interaction that influences the social dynamics in elementary school classrooms. We investigate this interplay in a large sample of 1112 students across 47 public primary classrooms in Chile. Using a video game interface to create a dyadic, non-anonymous social dilemma, we map the cooperative soc...

Internal factors-such as psychological traits or individual attitudes-relate to and explain political cleavages. Yet, little is known about how locus of control, agency, and modal attitudes impact political ideology. Utilizing textual analysis within the context of the Chilean 2015 constituent process, we go beyond traditional survey methods to exp...

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed people's lives. It had consequences at the individual and social level, changing the way we relate to each other. The behavioral immune system predicts that certain constraints will exist in different aspects of sociality when faced with the risk of contagion from pathogens. In this paper, we examine the hy...

Introduction The Male Warrior Hypothesis (MWH) proposes that sex-specific selective pressures have promoted male cooperation with the ingroup members to outcompete rival groups. However, intergroup conflicts do not occur in isolation and the outcomes of previous competitions may influence group cooperativeness. Since this phenomenon is not well und...

The COVID-19 outbreak implied many changes in the daily life of most of the world's population for a long time, prompting severe restrictions on sociality. The Behavioral Immune System (BIS) suggests that when facing pathogens, a psychological mechanism would be activated that, among other things, would generate an increase in prejudice and discrim...

In this study, we conduct a detailed empirical analysis of the relationship between personal feelings of insecurity, fear of crime, and the way individuals move and travel in their daily lives, with a particular focus on differences between genders. Our methodology combines subjective data gathered from individuals' reported perceptions of insecuri...

Despite increased global attention on violence against women, understanding the factors that lead to women becoming victims remains a critical challenge. Notably, the impact of domestic violence on women’s mobility—a critical determinant of their social and economic independence—has remained largely unexplored. This study bridges this gap, employin...

Intergroup conflict has been a persistent aspect of human societies since the emergence of our species. Various researchers have proposed that competition between groups has acted as a key selective force throughout human evolutionary history. Such intergroup competition for limited resources exacerbated the expression of intergroup aggression and...

Internal factors–such as psychological traits or individual attitudes–relate to and explain political cleavages. Yet, little is known about how locus of control, agency, and modal attitudes impact political ideology. Utilizing textual analysis within the Chilean 2015 constituent process context, we go beyond traditional survey methods to explore co...

In the complex landscape of primary education, the nexus between cooperation and bullying is a subtle yet vital thread that weaves together the social dynamics of the classroom. Here, we probed this interplay, examining a diverse sample of 1,137 students dispersed across 47 public primary classrooms in Chile. Using a video-game interface to create...

Despite increased global attention on violence against women, understanding the factors that lead to women becoming victims remains a critical challenge. Notably, the impact of domestic violence on women's mobility—a critical determinant of their social and economic independence—has remained largely unexplored. This study bridges this gap, employin...

Mobile call networks have been widely used to investigate communication patterns and the network of interactions of humans at the societal scale. Yet, more detailed analysis is often hindered by having no information about the nature of the relationships, even if some metadata about the individuals are available. Using a unique, large mobile phone...

Sociosexuality is a reliable proxy to evaluate the trade-off between short-term and long-term human mating strategies. The androgen receptor (AR) gene CAG-repeats polymorphism regulates the effect of testosterone and the expression of testosterone-related traits commonly associated with short-term mating strategies. According to the strategic plura...

Social relationships are pivotal for human beings. Yet, we still lack a complete understanding of the types and conditions of social relationships that facilitate learning among children. Here, we present the results of a study involving 855 elementary school children from 14 different public schools in Chile designed to understand their social lea...

In our species, the formation and maintenance of romantic partners is a nonrandom process. In this sense, similarity between members of the couple can be relevant for the beginning of the relationship (i.e., assortative mating) and maintenance, being similarity in attractiveness one of the most interesting aspects of this phenomenon. Despite that s...

In the past few decades, constitution-making processes have shifted from being undertakings performed by elites and closed off from the public to ones incorporating democratic mechanisms. Little is known, however, about the determinants of voluntary public participation and how they affect the outcomes of the deliberative process in terms of conten...

Social relationships are pivotal for human beings. Yet, we still lack a complete understanding of the types and conditions of social relationships that facilitate learning among children. Here, we present the results of a study involving 855 elementary school children from 14 different public schools in Chile designed to understand their social lea...

From an evolutionary perspective, phenotypic, social, and environmental factors help to shape the different costs and benefits of pursuing different reproductive strategies (or a mixture of them) from one individual to another. Since men’s reproductive success is mainly constrained to women’s availability, their mating orientations should be partia...

In both sexes, aggression has been described as a critical trait to acquire social status. Still, almost uniquely in men, the link between aggressiveness and the genetic background of testosterone sensitivity measured from the polymorphism in the androgen receptor (AR) gene has been previously investigated. We assessed the relevance of the AR gene...

Governance regimes that assign exclusive access to support collective action are increasingly promoted to manage common‐pool resources under the premise that they foster environmental stewardship. However, experimental evidence linked to existing policies that support this premise is lacking. Overlapping access policies in small‐scale fisheries pro...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237315.].

The effort to understand the genetic basis of human sociality has been encouraged by the diversity and heritability of social traits like cooperation. This task has remained elusive largely because most studies of sociality and genetics use sample sizes that are often unable to detect the small effects that single genes may have on complex social b...

Altruism (a costly action that benefits others) and reciprocity (the repayment of acts in kind) differ in that the former expresses preferences about the outcome of a social interaction, whereas the latter requires, in addition, ascribing intentions to others. Interestingly, an individual’s behavior and neurophysiological activity under outcome- ve...

The decision to allocate time and energy to find multiple sexual partners or raise children is a fundamental reproductive trade-off. The Strategic Pluralism Hypothesis argues that human reproductive strategies are facultatively calibrated towards either investing in mating or parenting (or a mixture), according to the expression of features depende...

In the past few decades, constitution-making processes have shifted from closed elite writing to incorporating democratic mechanisms. Yet, little is known about democratic participation in deliberative constitution-making processes. Here, we study a deliberative constituent process held by the Chilean government between 2015 and 2016. The Chilean p...

The Male Warrior Hypothesis (MWH) establishes that men’s psychology has been shaped by inter-group competition to acquire and protect reproductive resources. In this context, sex-specific selective pressures would have favored cooperation with the members of one’s group in combination with hostility towards outsiders. We investigate the role of dev...

Social networks are pivotal for learning. Yet, we still lack a full understanding of the mechanisms connecting networks with learning outcomes. Here, we present the results of a large scale study (946 elementary school children from 45 different classrooms) designed to understand the social strategies used by elementary school children. We mapped t...

Objective: There is evidence that competitive conflicts are the main form of intrasexual competition among men. The capacity to recognize visual cues of fighting ability in competitors is thought to be an important characteristic that allows men to avoid the costs of contest competition. However, for an accurate comparison to take place, individual...

Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). Here, we use data on the citation of academic articles and patents, and on the online attention received by songs, movies and biographies, to describe the temporal decay of the attenti...

We present a spatial agent-based model of the emergence and proliferation of premodern complex societies in an isolated region initially inhabited by simple societies. At the intrasocietal level, the model integrates scalar stress, social fission, sociocultural evolution, societal collapse, and Malthusian-Ricardian demographic dynamics. At the geog...

Human social skills are widely studied among very different disciplines. In this chapter, we review, discuss, and relate evidence concerning the process of valuing others’ perspectives, preferences, and behaviors from an economic, psychological, and neurobiological viewpoint. This process of valuing others (or other-regarding preferences) can be un...

We develop here a multi-agent model of the creation of knowledge (scientific progress or technological evolution) within a community of researchers devoted to such endeavors. In the proposed model, agents learn in a physical-technological landscape, and weight is attached to both individual search and social influence. We find that the combination...

During social bargain, one has to both figure out the others' intentions and behave strategically in such a way that the others' behaviors will be consistent with one's expectations. To understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these behaviors, we used electroencephalography while subjects played as proposers in a repeated Ultimatum Game...

A system is said to be meritocratic if the compensation and power available to individuals is determined by their abilities and merits. A system is topocratic if the compensation and power available to an individual is determined primarily by her position in a network. Here we introduce a model that is perfectly meritocratic for fully connected net...

ABSTRACT. We explore the external validity of a common pool resource (CPR) laboratory experiment. The experimental subjects were artisanal fishers who exploit benthic resources on the coast of Chile. A first set of subjects was recruited from fishers’ unions that comanage their resources through territorial user right areas. These unions differ in...

We present a microeconomic model of social stratification, which includes an endogenous fertility component. In the model, egalitarian and stratified societies coexist. The latter are divided into two hereditary classes: a warrior elite and a productive class. The model entails that the extra cost warriors must incur to train and equip their childr...

Marine ecosystems are in decline. New transformational changes in governance are urgently required to cope with overfishing, pollution, global changes, and other drivers of degradation. Here we explore social, political, and ecological aspects of a transformation in governance of Chile's coastal marine resources, from 1980 to today. Critical elemen...

Public schools in Chile receive a per-student subsidy depending on enrollment, and are managed by local governments that operate under soft budget constraints. In this paper, we study the effects of this system on per-student expenditures. Per-student expenditures on rural areas are 30% higher than in urban areas. We find that about 75% of this dif...

Public schools in Chile receive a per-student subsidy depending on enrollment, and are managed by local governments that operate under soft budget constraints. In this paper, we study the effects of this system on (i) academic performance of students attending public schools and (ii) per-student expenditures. The academic performance of students in...

Public schools in Chile receive a per-student subsidy depending on enrollment, and are managed by local governments that operate under soft budget constraints. In this paper, we study the effects of this system on per-student expenditures. Per-student expenditures on rural areas are 30% higher than in urban areas. We find that about 75% of this dif...

Within a standard stochastic evolutionary framework, we study the evolution of morality, both at the level of behavior and at the level of codes of behavior. These moral codes involve sanctioning deviant agents. We provide conditions under which the presence of any small degree of inter-group selection allows the emergence of moral codes which impr...

Gratuitous cooperation (in favour of non-relatives and without repeated interaction) eludes traditional evolutionary explanations. In this paper we survey the various theories of cooperative behaviour, and we describe our own effort to integrate these theories into a self-contained framework. Our main conclusions are as follows. First: altruistic p...

Whenever a company implements a group-based incentive plan for the first time, free-riding may destroy trust among employees and harm performance. We propose a static model to describe how employees make the decision of whether to cooperate or not, which considers material rewards and social preferences. Given the deep uncertainty involved, we conj...

The empirical study of network dynamics has been limited by the lack of longitudinal data. Here we introduce a quantitative indicator of link persistence to explore the correlations between the structure of a mobile phone network and the persistence of its links. We show that persistent links tend to be reciprocal and are more common for people wit...

In this paper we survey the theories of gratuitous cooperation, i.e., in favour of non-relatives and without repeated interaction. We also describe our work on the area, whose objective is to integrate the various theories of gratuitous cooperation into a self-contained framework. Our conclusions are as follows. First: altruistic punishment, confor...

When investment in individual reputation cannot solve contract incompleteness, group reputation becomes crucial to achieve social cooperation. In this article we develop a formal model in which the link between social pressure, group reputation formation and between groups trust is studied. Specifically, we model a transaction which involves trust...

When investment in individual reputation cannot solve contract incompleteness, group reputation becomes crucial to achieve social cooperation. In this article we develop a formal model in which the link between social pressure, group reputation formation and between groups trust is studied. Specifically, we model a transaction which involves trust...

We model the consumption life cycle of theater attendance for single movies by taking into account the size of the targeted group and the effect of social interactions. We provide an analytical solution of such model, which we contrast with empirical data from the film industry obtaining good agreement with the diverse types of behaviors empiricall...

We model the consumption life cycle of theater attendance for single movies by taking into account the size of the targeted group and the effect of social interactions. We provide an analytical solution of such model, which we contrast with empirical data from the film industry obtaining good agreement with the diverse types of behaviors empiricall...

The lack of longitudinal data has prevented the study of dynamic network properties. Here, we use cellular phone billing data to analyze the coupling between network structure and dynamics. Using 10 panels we find that the persistence of social ties, defined as the probability of observing a tie when looking at a panel, is coupled to the network's...

The following report details the results from the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commissions pilot study on the human, social and economic costs of drugs in the Americas. This program is the first of its kind in the hemisphere where a group of countries has embarked jointly on common economic impact studies. Although the participating countries...