Self-regulation versus social influence for promoting cooperation on networks

Dario Madeo,Chiara Mocenni

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-61634-7

Abstract

Cooperation is a relevant and controversial phenomenon in human societies. Indeed, although it is widely recognized essential for tackling social dilemmas, finding suitable policies for promoting cooperation can be arduous and expensive. More often, it is driven by pre-established schemas based on norms and punishments. To overcome this paradigm, we highlight the interplay between the influence of social interactions on networks and spontaneous self-regulating mechanisms on individuals behavior. We show that the presence of these mechanisms in a prisoner’s dilemma game, may oppose the willingness of individuals to defect, thus allowing them to behave cooperatively, while interacting with others and taking conflicting decisions over time. These results are obtained by extending the Evolutionary Game Equations over Networks to account for self-regulating mechanisms. Specifically, we prove that players may partially or fully cooperate whether self-regulating mechanisms are sufficiently stronger than social pressure. The proposed model can explain unconditional cooperation (strong self-regulation) and unconditional defection (weak self-regulation). For intermediate self-regulation values, more complex behaviors are observed, such as mutual defection, recruiting (cooperate if others cooperate), exploitation of cooperators (defect if others cooperate) and altruism (cooperate if others defect). These phenomena result from dynamical transitions among different game structures, according to changes of system parameters and cooperation of neighboring players. Interestingly, we show that the topology of the network of connections among players is crucial when self-regulation, and the associated costs, are reasonably low. In particular, a population organized on a random network with a Scale-Free distribution of connections is more cooperative than on a network with an Erdös-Rényi distribution, and, in turn, with a regular one. These results highlight that social diversity, encoded within heterogeneous networks, is more effective for promoting cooperation.

Highlights

Cooperation is a relevant and controversial phenomenon in human societies
It is worthwhile to notice that SR-evolutionary game on networks (EGN) equation can be rewritten as follows: xv = xv(1 − xv){kv[(1 − T − S)xv + S] − βv[(1 − T − S)xv + S]}, (6)
Since the SR-EGN depends on the difference of terms (4) and (5), their comparison allows us to evaluate the relationship between social influence and self-regulation by means of self-regulation strength βv and degree kv of player v

Summary

Introduction

Cooperation is a relevant and controversial phenomenon in human societies. it is widely recognized essential for tackling social dilemmas, finding suitable policies for promoting cooperation can be arduous and expensive. In order to study the global or partial emergence of cooperation in human societies, we propose to extend the EGN equation described above by introducing self-regulating processes.

Results

Conclusion