Conformity enhances network reciprocity in evolutionary social dilemmas (1412.4113v1)

Abstract: The pursuit of highest payoffs in evolutionary social dilemmas is risky and sometimes inferior to conformity. Choosing the most common strategy within the interaction range is safer because it ensures that the payoff of an individual will not be much lower than average. Herding instincts and crowd behavior in humans and social animals also compel to conformity on their own right. Motivated by these facts, we here study the impact of conformity on the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas. We show that an appropriate fraction of conformists within the population introduces an effective surface tension around cooperative clusters and ensures smooth interfaces between different strategy domains. Payoff-driven players brake the symmetry in favor of cooperation and enable an expansion of clusters past the boundaries imposed by traditional network reciprocity. This mechanism works even under the most testing conditions, and it is robust against variations of the interaction network as long as degree-normalized payoffs are applied. Conformity may thus be beneficial for the resolution of social dilemmas.

Conformity in Network Reciprocity for Evolutionary Social Dilemmas

This paper examines the role of conformity in enhancing network reciprocity within the context of evolutionary social dilemmas. The paper is rooted in the framework of evolutionary game theory and focuses on understanding how conformity impacts the dynamics of cooperation versus defection in structured populations.

Primary Contributions and Findings

The authors investigate how conformity—specifically, the tendency of individuals to adopt the most prevalent strategy in their immediate network—affects the evolution of cooperative behavior. The paper posits that including conformity-driven players introduces an effective mechanism that enhances cooperation by forming compact clusters with smooth interfaces between cooperative and defective regions. This phenomenon is described as an effective surface tension around cooperative clusters, encouraging the expansion of cooperation beyond the limits set by traditional network reciprocity mechanisms.

Key findings of the paper include:

1. Conformity's Influence on Cooperation: Conformity among a sufficient fraction of the population can significantly enhance cooperative outcomes in social dilemmas, surpassing the limits of conventional network reciprocity. Numerical simulations showed that cooperation could prevail even under harsh conditions typically favoring defection.
2. Mechanisms of Strategy Evolution: The interplay between conformity-driven and payoff-driven players leads to pattern formations where conformists aid in sustaining cooperative phases by creating smooth interfaces between competing strategies, effectively minimizing interface friction.
3. Impact of Network Structure: The research demonstrates that conformity-enhanced reciprocity is robust against varying network structures and payoff formulations, including both lattice-based networks and scale-free networks under degree-normalized payoffs.
4. Non-Monotonicity in Cooperation Levels: A notable outcome is the bell-shaped dependence of cooperation levels on the fraction of conformity-driven players, where cooperation levels improve with the introduction of some conformists but diminish when conformity overtakes strategy diversity entirely.

Implications and Theoretical Insights

The paper provides valuable theoretical insights into the integration of conformity as an evolutionary strategy that enhances cooperative behavior in structured populations. Conformity is conceptualized as a mechanism that catalyzes an efficient organization of cooperators into stable and resilient clusters, irrespective of the specific form of the social dilemma being modeled, be it the weak or strong form of the prisoner’s dilemma.

Practical Implications: In practical terms, these findings suggest that fostering a balance between individualistic (payoff-driven) and conformist behavior in social systems and organizational structures can be beneficial for achieving higher levels of cooperation. This could have applications in areas ranging from policy design to network management and organizational behavior studies.

Future Research Directions

The research opens multiple avenues for future exploration:

• Dynamic Adaptation of Strategies: Further studies could address how dynamic changes in personal strategies and motivations might impact cooperative dynamics when players are allowed to adaptively shift between payoff-driven and conformity-driven paradigms.
• Cultural Transmission and Heterogeneity: Examination of cultural transmission mechanisms that could foster or inhibit diverse strategy adoption over time would provide a richer understanding of long-term evolutionary behaviors.
• Coevolution of Strategies and Networks: Expanding this research to investigate the coevolution of strategy adoption alongside network changes might yield deeper insights into the persistence and diffusion of cooperation within complex adaptive systems.

Overall, this work extends the understanding of cooperation in complex networks by integrating the role of conformity, highlighting its significance in maintaining cooperative societies amidst challenging social dilemmas.