Abstract
Deliberate deceptiveness intended to gain an advantage is commonplace in human and animal societies. In a social dilemma, an individual may only pretend to be a cooperator to elicit cooperation from others, while in reality he is a defector. With this as motivation, we study a simple variant of the evolutionary prisonerʼs dilemma game entailing deceitful defectors and conditional cooperators that lifts the veil on the impact of such two-faced behavior. Defectors are able to hide their true intentions at a personal cost, while conditional cooperators are probabilistically successful at identifying defectors and act accordingly. By focusing on the evolutionary outcomes in structured populations, we observe a number of unexpected and counterintuitive phenomena. We show that deceitful behavior may fare better if it is costly, and that a higher success rate of identifying defectors does not necessarily favor cooperative behavior. These results are rooted in the spontaneous emergence of cycling dominance and spatial patterns that give rise to fascinating phase transitions, which in turn reveal the hidden complexity behind the evolution of deception.
Highlights
Natural selection favors the fittest under adversity and testing conditions
These results are due to the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance and self-organized pattern formation, both of which give rise to continuous and discontinuous phase transitions that highlight the complexity behind the evolution of deception
Depending on the proximity to phase transition points and the typical size of emerging spatial patterns, we have varied the linear size of the lattice from L = 400 to L = 6000 and the relaxation time from 103 to 105 Monte Carlo step (MCS) to obtain solutions that are valid in the large system size limit, and to ensure that the statistical error is comparable with the size of the symbols in the figures
Summary
Natural selection favors the fittest under adversity and testing conditions. According to Darwins The Origin of Species, organisms change gradually over time to give rise to the astonishing diversity of life that is on display today [1]. Unconditional strategies—cooperators that always cooperate and defectors that always defect—constitute a simplification that deserves further exploration since it is a fact that individuals, whether human or animal, will likely behave differently under different circumstances [31] This invites the introduction of conditional strategies and deceptiveness [36, 37], both of which we accommodate in the presently studied variant of the evolutionary prisoners dilemma game. While low detection probabilities help defectors and high hiding costs obviously work against the effectiveness of deception, much more unexpectedly, we will show how deceitful behavior may fare better if it is costly, and how a higher success rate of identifying defectors does not necessarily favor cooperative behavior These results are due to the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance and self-organized pattern formation, both of which give rise to continuous and discontinuous phase transitions that highlight the complexity behind the evolution of deception
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