Cooperation Prevails When Individuals Adjust Their Social Ties

By Francisco C. Santos, Jorge M. Pacheco, Tom Lenaerts. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2006

586 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conventional evolutionary game theory predicts that natural selection favours the selfish and strong even though cooperative interactions thrive at all levels of organization in living systems. Recent investigations demonstrated that a limiting factor for the evolution of cooperative interactions is the way in which they are organized, cooperators becoming evolutionarily competitive whenever individuals are constrained to interact with few others along the edges of networks with low average connectivity. Despite this insight, the conundrum of cooperation remains since recent empirical data shows that real networks exhibit typically high average connectivity and associated single-to-broad–scale heterogeneity. Here, a computational model is constructed in which individuals are able to self-organize both their strategy and their social ties throughout evolution, based exclusively on their self-interest. We show that the entangled evolution of individual strategy and network structure constitutes a key mechanism for the sustainability of cooperation in social networks. For a given average connectivity of the population, there is a critical value for the ratio W between the time scales associated with the evolution of strategy and of structure above which cooperators wipe out defectors. Moreover, the emerging social networks exhibit an overall heterogeneity that accounts very well for the diversity of patterns recently found in acquired data on social networks. Finally, heterogeneity is found to become maximal when W reaches its critical value. These results show that simple topological dynamics reflecting the individual capacity for self-organization of social ties can produce realistic networks of high average connectivity with associated single-to-broad–scale heterogeneity. On the other hand, they show that cooperation cannot evolve as a result of “social viscosity” alone in heterogeneous networks with high average connectivity, requiring the additional mechanism of topological co-evolution to ensure the survival of cooperative behaviour.

Subfields: Genetics, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b1576b1fb41b7ea3592fda380c4a0f707a02d3f

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Citations in the corpus

Evolutionary game theory: Temporal and spatial effects beyond replicator dynamics (2009, background): “This promising idea has already been proposed [138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145] and a number of interesting results, which would deserve a separate review on their own right(7), have been obtained regarding the emergence of cooperation.”
Social network theory: new insights and issues for behavioral ecologists (2009, background): “For groups of a given size, cooperation is more likely to be favored if individuals interact in relatively small subgroups (e.g., primarily with a few neighbors; Santos et al. 2006).”
Evolutionary Establishment of Moral and Double Moral Standards through Spatial Interactions (2010, unknown): “Furthermore, it would be interesting to investigate the emergence of punishment within the framework of a coevolutionary model [54–56], where both, individual strategies and punishment levels are simultaneously spread.”
Evolutionary games on graphs (2006, background): “e network. We restrict our attention to the surroundings of two connected central players (called hubs), each linked to a large number of other, less connected players, as shown in Fig. 35. Following Santos et al. (2006c), we wish to illustrate the basic mechanism how cooperation gets supported when”
Coalitions in theory and reality: a review of pertinent variables and processes (2015, background): “(Skyrms & Pemantle, 2000; Pemantle & Skyrms, 2004a, b; Hruschka &Henrich, 2006; Pacheco et al., 2006, 2008; Santos et al., 2006; Gavrilets et al., 2008; Aktipis, 2011).”
Behavioural trait assortment in a social network: patterns and implications (2009, background): “It has been suggested that behavioural assortment by co-operative behaviour may be important in maintaining co-operation (Wilson and Dugatkin 1997; Ohtsuki et al. 2006; Santos et al. 2006).”