How can cultural conditions affect society’s decisions?

Abstract

Recently, the evolution of people cooperation in the context of evolutionary games has attracted noticeable attention. In this regard, people’s assessment of their neighbor’s payoff affects the cooperation or defection decisions. Different decisions of each person can be a function of environment (e.g. cultural, climatic, and physical conditions). Thus, the individuals’ decisions and their values can change under the influence of these factors. In the present study, the effect of cultural, climatic, and physical conditions is considered as a chaotic dynamic (here Lorenz system). Using different initial conditions, the Lorenz time-series is unique to each individual in calculating her/his payoff. In other words, society members are considered as agents or nodes within a complex network. Here, the mechanism of applying Lorenz dynamics and external force in the context of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game is applied. Using large-scale Monte Carlo simulations, we can see that the cooperation of the whole network is significantly improved even in the presence of a small external force. It is concluded that applying a chaotic dynamic on valuations and coupling between agents is an effective way to increase network cooperation, even in severely tempted situations of the evolutionary game. It is stated that the impact of cultural, climatic, educational conditions and the coupling between agents in the cooperation of social networks, can be modeled by the help of chaotic signals.