Abstract
For almost four decades, cooperation has been studied through the lens of the prisoner’s dilemma game, with cooperation modelled as the play of a specific strategy. However, an alternative approach to cooperative behavior has recently been proposed. Known as collaboration, the new approach considers mutualistic strategic choice and can be applied to any game. Here, we bring these approaches together and study the effect of collaboration on cooperative dynamics in the standard prisoner’s dilemma setting. It turns out that, from a baseline of zero cooperation in the absence of collaboration, even relatively rare opportunities to collaborate can support material, and robust, levels of cooperation. This effect is mediated by the interaction structure, such that collaboration leads to greater levels of cooperation when each individual strategically interacts with relatively few other individuals, matching well-known characteristics of human interaction networks. Conversely, collaboratively induced cooperation vanishes from dense networks, thus placing environmental limits on collaboration’s successful role in cooperation.
Highlights
It is generally accepted that cooperation, understood in a broad sense, is widespread amongst great apes [1] and there is evidence that humans are more cooperative, in the sense of being more likely to undertake jointly intentional behavior, than other great apes [2, 3]
This has led to the conjecture, known as the shared intentionality hypothesis [4] or the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis [5,6,7], that the social and cooperative nature of humans provided a niche in which sophisticated cognitive capacities could evolve
For a concise and unified description of such mechanisms, the reader is referred to Nowak [20], for an extensive and detailed discussion of cooperation, to Bowles and Gintis [21], for a specialized review of parochial altruism theory, to Rusch [22]; or to other key studies [23,24,25,26,27,28,29]
Summary
It is generally accepted that cooperation, understood in a broad sense, is widespread amongst great apes [1] and there is evidence that humans are more cooperative, in the sense of being more likely to undertake jointly intentional behavior, than other great apes [2, 3]. This has led to the conjecture, known as the shared intentionality hypothesis [4] or the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis [5,6,7], that the social and cooperative nature of humans provided a niche in which sophisticated cognitive capacities could evolve. For a concise and unified description of such mechanisms, the reader is referred to Nowak [20], for an extensive and detailed discussion of cooperation, to Bowles and Gintis [21], for a specialized review of parochial altruism theory, to Rusch [22]; or to other key studies [23,24,25,26,27,28,29]
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