Evolution of cooperation with contextualized behavior

Abstract

How do networks of social interaction govern the emergence and stability of prosocial behavior? Theoretical studies of this question typically assume unconditional behavior, meaning that an individual either cooperates with all opponents or defects against all opponents—an assumption that produces a pessimistic outlook for the evolution of cooperation, especially in highly connected populations. Although these models may be appropriate for simple organisms, humans have sophisticated cognitive abilities that allow them to distinguish between opponents and social contexts, so they can condition their behavior on the identity of opponents. Here, we study the evolution of cooperation when behavior is conditioned by social context, but behaviors can spill over between contexts. Our mathematical analysis shows that contextualized behavior rescues cooperation across a broad range of population structures, even when the number of social contexts is small. Increasing the number of social contexts further promotes cooperation by orders of magnitude.

Cooperation and the social brain hypothesis in primate social networks

“…Thirteen out of the 67 networks yielded negative (b/c)* values, which imply that spiteful behavior evolves instead of cooperation (Allen et al, 2017;Su et al, 2022). We discarded these networks because we are interested in cooperation under social dilemma situations, and because the qualitatively different interpretation of a unit change for (b/c)* values above and below zero (i.e., a unit change in the positive direction below zero means that spite evolves more easily, whereas a similar change above zero means that cooperation evolves less easily) violates regression modeling assumptions.…”

Theoretical analyses of stochastic evolutionary game systems

“…Here x i is the frequency of strategy i in the population, the angular bracket denotes the average taken over all states of the system, weighted by the probability of finding the system in each state, and 1/S is the corresponding stationary frequency under neutral drift. It is very difficult to obtain the corresponding stationary distribution for any intensities of selection, and almost all relevant studies focus on the case of weak selection [37][38][39][40][41][42][43].…”

Evolution of cooperation in multiplex networks through asymmetry between interaction and replacement

“…It should be noted that the findings mentioned above were obtained from a model that begins with a certain portion of the population as cooperators. On the other hand, there exist studies that analyze the evolution of cooperative behavior by using fixation probabilities, i.e., the likelihood of one individual's strategy dominating the entire population, starting from a state in which only a single individual in the population is a cooperator [15][16][17][18][19][20] . These studies, using fixation probabilities, facilitate strict mathematical analysis under the weak selection condition, leading to numerous well-established research conclusions.…”