Costly hide and seek pays: Unexpected consequences of deceit in a social dilemma

Abstract

Deliberate deceptiveness intended to gain an advantage is commonplace in human and animal societies. In a social dilemma, an individual may only pretend to be a cooperator to elicit cooperation from others, while in reality he is a defector. With this as motivation, we study a simple variant of the evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game entailing deceitful defectors and conditional cooperators that lifts the veil on the impact of such two-faced behavior. Defectors are able to hide their true intentions at a personal cost, while conditional cooperators are probabilistically successful at identifying defectors and act accordingly. By focusing on the evolutionary outcomes in structured populations, we observe a number of unexpected and counterintuitive phenomena. We show that deceitful behavior may fare better if it is costly, and that a higher success rate of identifying defectors does not necessarily favor cooperative behavior. These results are rooted in the spontaneous emergence of cycling dominance and spatial patterns that give rise to fascinating phase transitions, which in turn reveal the hidden complexity behind the evolution of deception.

16 pages, 8 figures; accepted for publication in New Journal of Physics

References in corpus (8)

• Evolutionary games on graphs
• Evolutionary dynamics of group interactions on structured populations: A review
• Reward and cooperation in the spatial public goods game
• Dynamical Organization of Cooperation in Complex Topologies
• Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: A review
• Defense mechanisms of empathetic players in the spatial ultimatum game
• Robustness of Cooperation in the Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma on Complex Networks
• The evolution of cooperation by social exclusion

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The self-organizing impact of averaged payoffs on the evolution of cooperation
• Strategy dependent learning activity in cyclic dominant systems
• Supporting punishment via taxation in a structured population
• Invasion controlled pattern formation in a generalized multi-species predator-prey system
• Breaking unidirectional invasions jeopardizes biodiversity in spatial May-Leonard systems
• Emerging solutions from the battle of defensive alliances
• Conditions for the existence of zero-determinant strategies under observation errors in repeated games
• Oppressed species can form a winning pair in a multi-species ecosystem
• Oscillatory cooperation prevalence emerges from misperception
• Suppressing defection by increasing temptation: the impact of smart cooperators on a social dilemma situation
• The survival of the weakest in a biased donation game
• Hostility prevents the tragedy of the commons in metapopulation with asymmetric migration: A lesson from queenless ants
• Cooperation in costly-access environments