Abstract
While cooperation and risk aversion are considered to be evolutionarily advantageous in many circumstances, and selfish or risky behaviour can bring negative consequences for individuals and the community at large, selfish and risk-seeking behaviour is still often observed in human societies. In this paper we consider whether there are environmental and social conditions that favour selfish risk-seeking individuals within a community and whether tolerating such individuals may provide benefits to the community itself in some circumstances. We built an agent-based model including two types of agent—selfish risk-seeking and generous risk-averse—that harvest resources from the environment and share them (or not) with their community. We found that selfish risk-seekers can outperform generous risk-averse agents in conditions where their survival is moderately challenged, supporting the theory that selfish and risk-seeking traits combined are not dysfunctional but rather can be evolutionarily advantageous for agents. The benefit for communities is less clear, but when generous agents are unconditionally cooperative communities with a greater proportion of selfish risk-seeking agents grow to a larger population size suggesting some advantage to the community overall.
Highlights
Selfishness and risk preferencesBiological selfishness has been long discussed as an adaptive trait in both humans and animals [1]
The results reported for this model refer to an abundant environment (e = 4.5), since no qualitative differences were observed between the two levels of resources: the population size varied between the two environments, the percentage of selfish and generous agents differed by no more than 1.5%
Our model focused on the evolution of a community composed of two different behavioural types: those exhibiting generous risk-averse attitudes and those with selfish risk-seeking behaviours
Summary
Biological selfishness has been long discussed as an adaptive trait in both humans and animals [1]. Selfishness, defined as the gain of one’s fitness at the cost of others’, provides an advantage in the ‘survival of the fittest’, where genes that are passed on to the generation in greater numbers become more frequent in the population. Selfish genomes have been found to be a crucial element for evolutionary change and innovation in individuals [2]. Selfishness in this biological sense is intrinsically connected to fitness and evolutionary advantage. Selfishness in the social sense may be selected against: both empirical and theoretical work have.
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