Imitating emotions instead of strategies in spatial games elevates social welfare

Abstract

The success of imitation as an evolutionary driving force in spatial games has often been questioned, especially for social dilemmas such as the snowdrift game, where the most profitable may be the mixed phase sustaining both the cooperative as well as the defective strategy. Here we reexamine this assumption by investigating the evolution of cooperation in spatial social dilemma games, where instead of pure strategies players can adopt emotional profiles of their neighbors. For simplicity, the emotional profile of each player is determined by two pivotal factors only, namely how it behaves towards less and how towards more successful neighbors. We find that imitating emotions such as goodwill and envy instead of pure strategies from the more successful players reestablishes imitation as a tour de force for resolving social dilemmas on structured populations without any additional assumptions or strategic complexity.

6 two-column pages, 6 figures; accepted for publication in Europhysics Letters

References in corpus (11)

• Evolutionary games on graphs
• Dynamical Organization of Cooperation in Complex Topologies
• Resolving social dilemmas on evolving random networks
• Emergence of multilevel selection in the prisoner's dilemma game on coevolving random networks
• Universality of weak selection
• Social dilemmas in an online social network: the structure and evolution of cooperation
• Social Dilemmas and Cooperation in Complex Networks
• Fixation times in evolutionary games under weak selection
• Emergent Hierarchical Structures in Multiadaptive Games
• The edge of neutral evolution in social dilemmas
• Ordering in spatial evolutionary games for pairwise collective strategy updates

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Evolution of extortion in structured populations
• Evolution of emotions on networks leads to the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas
• Stochastic win-stay-lose-shift strategy with dynamic aspirations in evolutionary social dilemmas
• Statistical Physics of the Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma with Memory-Aware Agents
• The coevolution of overconfidence and bluffing in the resource competition game
• Costly hide and seek pays: Unexpected consequences of deceit in a social dilemma
• Role-separating ordering in social dilemmas controlled by topological frustration
• Tactical cooperation of defectors in a multi-stage public goods game
• The Beneficial Role of Mobility for the Emergence of Innovation
• Influence of opinion dynamics on the evolution of games
• Roles of mutation rate and co-existence of multiple strategy updating rules in evolutionary prisoner's dilemma games
• Evolution of Cooperation on Spatially Embedded Networks
• Multiple learning mechanisms promote cooperation in public goods games with project selection
• Hierarchical invasion of cooperation in complex networks
• Competition among alliances of different sizes