Interdependence between individual and social learning shapes cooperation with asymmetric exploration

Abstract: Cooperation on social networks is crucial for understanding human survival and development. Although network structure has been found to significantly influence cooperation, some human experiments indicate that it cannot fully explain the evolutionary patterns of cooperation. While evidence suggests that this gap arises from human exploration, our understanding of its impact mechanisms and characteristics, such as asymmetry, remains limited. Here, we seek to formalize human exploration as an individual learning process involving trial and reflection, and integrate social learning to examine how their interdependence shapes cooperation. We find that individual learning can alter the imitative tendency of social learning, while its cooperative tendency in turn relies on social learning and players' decision preferences. By analyzing a series of key experiments, we show that the above coupled dynamics can explain human behavior in game interactions. Furthermore, we find that individual learning can promote cooperation when its probability is negatively correlated with payoffs, a mechanism rooted in the psychological tendency to avoid trial-and-error when individuals are satisfied with their current payoffs. These results link long-unexplained asymmetric exploration with the cooperation-promoting ability of social networks, helping to bridge the gap between theoretical research and reality.