Imitating emotions instead of strategies in spatial games elevates social welfare

By Attila Szolnoki, Nenggang Xie, Matjaz Perc. 2011

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The success of imitation as an evolutionary driving force in spatial games has often been questioned, especially for social dilemmas such as the snowdrift game, where the most profitable one may be the mixed phase sustaining both the cooperative and the defective strategy. Here we reexamine this assumption by investigating the evolution of cooperation in spatial social-dilemma games, where, instead of pure strategies, players can adopt emotional profiles of their neighbors. For simplicity, the emotional profile of each player is determined by two pivotal factors only, namely how it behaves towards less and how towards more successful neighbors. We find that imitating emotions such as goodwill and envy instead of pure strategies from the more successful players reestablishes imitation as a tour de force for resolving social dilemmas on structured populations without any additional assumptions or strategic complexity.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0447055a175bf6e14b89504a4ca6f1ee31172aa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Guozhen Tan
2. Fenghui Ren
3. Chao Yu
4. Minjie Zhang

Citations in the corpus

• Emotional Multiagent Reinforcement Learning in Spatial Social Dilemmas (2015, background): “On the other hand, several studies [15], [16] have examined social dilemmas based on rule-based emotional frameworks, in which agents should decide whether to cooperate directly based on the emotions derived from a predefined rule system.”