Abstract

Social learning plays a key role in the evolution of cooperation in humans and other animals. It has also been shown both theoretically and experimentally that environmental adversity is also a key determinant of the evolution of cooperation among individuals. Here we investigate the impact of social learning on the evolution of cooperation in the context of a range of levels of environmental adversity. We used an agent-based simulated world of asexual individuals that communicate and play a probabilistic version of the Prisoners Dilemma game. We considered simulated worlds either with or without random spreading of the offspring and two variants of social learning, either copying to some extent all communication rules or copying fully some of the communication rules of the best performing neighbor individual. The results show that in the case of spreading of the offspring, social learning increases the level of cooperation and reverses the association between this and the level of environmental adversity...

Highlights

  • The emergence and evolution of cooperation among individual humans and animals is a fundamental question of social evolution (Axelrod, 1997)

  • We considered two variants of social learning, in one case the learner copies to some extent the communication rules of the most successful neighbor, in the other case the learner copies fully some of the communication rules of the most successful neighbor

  • The results show that copying fully some communication rules increases the level of cooperation more than the considered alternative social learning method

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Summary

Introduction

The emergence and evolution of cooperation among individual humans and animals is a fundamental question of social evolution (Axelrod, 1997). Having additional measures of correlates of cooperation is useful to understand better the context of the measured level of cooperation One such measure is the communication complexity of the interactions between the individuals of the community (Andras, 2008). We present the use of an agent-based simulation which implements communicating agents that play prisoner’s dilemma games (Axelrod, 1997) to investigate the role of social learning in the context of evolution of cooperation in communities of selfish individuals. The results show that copying fully some communication rules increases the level of cooperation more than the considered alternative social learning method. Both social learning methods have much more effect if the offspring are widely dispersed. The paper is closed by the discussion and conclusions section

Background
Results and Analysis
Discussion and Conclusions
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