Abstract
Competitive cognition dynamics are widespread in modern society, especially with the rise of information-technology ecosystem. While previous works mainly focus on internal interactions among individuals, the impacts of the external public opinion environment remain unknown. Here, we propose a heuristic model based on co-evolutionary game theory to study the feedback-evolving dynamics of competitive cognitions and the environment. First, we show co-evolutionary trajectories of strategy-environment system under all possible circumstances. Of particular interest, we unveil the detailed dynamical patterns under the existence of an interior saddle point. In this situation, two stable states coexist in the system and both cognitions have a chance to win. We highlight the emergence of bifurcation phenomena, indicating that the final evolutionary outcome is sensitive to initial conditions. Further, the attraction basins of two stable states are not only influenced by the position of the interior saddle point but also affected by the relative speed of environmental feedbacks.
Highlights
Individual cognitive process and public cognition evolution have aroused great concern and have been widely studied in recent years due to the rapid development of information-technology ecosystem consisting of news medias, blogs, large-scale social networks, etc. [1,2,3,4,5,6]
While previous models interpret the evolution of competitive cognitions mainly as a result of internal interactions among individuals, either described by the effects of social influence or by the spreading dynamics such as contact-based transmission, the impact of external public opinion environment, especially the media atmosphere of supporting a certain cognition, is ignored [14]
The evolutionary outcome of the competitive cognitions is determined by both the benefit from the new cognition and the feedback from public opinion environment, especially in the era of social medias. It remains largely unknown how the public opinion environment influences the evolutionary dynamics of competitive cognitions. To advance this important issue, in this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to describe the co-evolution of competitive cognitions and public opinion environment using co-evolutionary game theory, which has been developed recently to study the feedback loops between environment and strategies that are widely observed in biological and ecological systems [41,42,43,44,45,46]
Summary
Individual cognitive process and public cognition evolution have aroused great concern and have been widely studied in recent years due to the rapid development of information-technology ecosystem consisting of news medias, blogs, large-scale social networks, etc. [1,2,3,4,5,6]. While previous models interpret the evolution of competitive cognitions mainly as a result of internal interactions among individuals, either described by the effects of social influence or by the spreading dynamics such as contact-based transmission, the impact of external public opinion environment, especially the media atmosphere of supporting a certain cognition, is ignored [14]. The evolutionary outcome of the competitive cognitions is determined by both the benefit from the new cognition and the feedback from public opinion environment, especially in the era of social medias. It remains largely unknown how the public opinion environment influences the evolutionary dynamics of competitive cognitions. The co-evolutionary game dynamics of competitive cognitions and public opinion environment can be written as follows:
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