Antisocial behavior-based environmental feedback in spatial prisoner's dilemma game

Abstract

The environment, people, and behavior are interdependent and always interactive influence. In reality, a higher cooperation level may change the environment in a way that is beneficial for all competitors. Herein, this work proposed a coevolutionary model in the prisoner's dilemma game where the community environment determines the anti-social revenue structure. Moreover, to capture this phenomenon that behavioral changes induced by the individual's perception of the external environment, the memory effect is also taken into account in this work. It suggests that individuals' stored information about community cooperative level (referred to as indirect experience) can trigger antisocial behavior by influencing their perceptions of antisocial revenue, and that their own past strategic information (referred to as direct experience) also plays a similar role. Numerous simulations show that the proposed mechanism significantly improves cooperation, especially when sensitivity to the environment is taken into account. Furthermore, when memory is considered, a lack of experience and insufficient environmental information may result in different optimal cooperative levels corresponding to different b. In addition, the impact of the sufficient indirect experience and the immediate environmental feedback on cooperation are nearly identical. When individuals have sufficient direct and indirect experiences, their roles can be interchangeably in decision-making. Finally, we discovered that the proposed mechanism exhibits good robustness. Overall, this study demonstrates an innovative use of quantitative calculations to describe the conclusions of qualitative analysis, which have theoretical and practical implications.