Conjoining uncooperative societies facilitates evolution of cooperation

Abstract

Social structure affects the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Here we study the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in fragmented societies, and show that conjoining segregated cooperation-inhibiting groups, if done properly, rescues the fate of collective cooperation. We highlight the essential role of inter-group ties, that sew the patches of the social network together and facilitate cooperation. We point out several examples of this phenomenon in actual settings. We explore random and non-random graphs, as well as empirical networks. In many cases we find a marked reduction of the critical benefit-to-cost ratio needed for sustaining cooperation. Our finding gives hope that the increasing worldwide connectivity, if managed properly, can promote global cooperation.

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Evolution of prosocial behavior in multilayer populations
• Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
• Social goods dilemmas in heterogeneous societies
• Fixation probabilities in evolutionary dynamics under weak selection
• Eco-evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in the presence of policing
• Transient amplifiers of selection and reducers of fixation for death-Birth updating on graphs
• A mathematical formalism for natural selection with arbitrary spatial and genetic structure
• Evolutionary Games on Isothermal Graphs
• The conflict between self-interaction and updating passivity in the evolution of cooperation
• Dynamics of collective action to conserve a large common-pool resource
• Effects of Stochastic Games on Evolutionary Dynamics in Structured Populations
• Predicting transitions in cooperation levels from network connectivity
• The survival of the weakest in a biased donation game