Social imitation vs strategic choice, or consensus vs cooperation in the networked Prisoner's Dilemma

Abstract

The interplay of social and strategic motivations in human interactions is a largely unexplored question in collective social phenomena. Whether individuals' decisions are taken in a pure strategic basis or due to social pressure without a rational background crucially influences the model outcome. Here we study a networked Prisoner's Dilemma in which decisions are made either based on the replication of the most successful neighbor's strategy (unconditional imitation) or by pure social imitation following an update rule inspired by the voter model. The main effects of the voter dynamics are an enhancement of the final consensus, i.e., asymptotic states are generally uniform, and a promotion of cooperation in certain regions of the parameter space as compared to the outcome of purely strategic updates. Thus, voter dynamics acts as an interface noise and has a similar effect to a pure random noise; furthermore, its influence is mostly independent of the network heterogeneity. When strategic decisions are made following other update rules such as the replicator or Moran processes, the dynamic mixed state found under unconditional imitation for some parameters disappears, but an increase of cooperation in certain parameter regions is still observed. Comparing our results with recent experiments on the Prisoner's Dilemma, we conclude that such a mixed dynamics may explain moody conditional cooperation among the agents.

arXiv comment9 pages, 10 figures. In press for Physical Review E

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Statistical physics of human cooperation
• Balancing selfishness and norm conformity can explain human behavior in large-scale Prisoner's Dilemma games and can poise human groups near criticality
• Evolutionary games on multilayer networks: coordination and equilibrium selection
• Satisfied-defect, unsatisfied-cooperate: An evolutionary dynamics of cooperation led by aspiration
• Coordination and equilibrium selection in games: the role of local effects
• Hierarchical invasion of cooperation in complex networks
• Cooperation transitions in social games induced by aspiration-driven players
• Social Pressure and Environmental Effects on Networks: A Path to Cooperation
• An Evolutionary Game Model for Understanding Fraud in Consumption Taxes
• Socio-Affective Agents as Models of Human Behaviour in the Networked Prisoner's Dilemma
• Cooperation in costly-access environments