74,951 research outputs found
Emergence of communities and diversity in social networks
Communities are common in complex networks and play a significant role in the functioning of social, biological, economic,
and technological systems. Despite widespread interest in detecting community structures in complex networks and exploring the
effect of communities on collective dynamics, a deep understanding of the emergence and prevalence of communities in social
networks is still lacking. Addressing this fundamental problem
is of paramount importance in understanding, predicting, and
controlling a variety of collective behaviors in society. An elusive question is how communities with common internal properties arise in social networks with great individual diversity. Here,
we answer this question using the ultimatum game, which has
been a paradigm for characterizing altruism and fairness. We
experimentally show that stable local communities with different
internal agreements emerge spontaneously and induce social
diversity into networks, which is in sharp contrast to populations with random interactions. Diverse communities and social
norms come from the interaction between responders with inherent heterogeneous demands and rational proposers via local connections, where the former eventually become the community
leaders. This result indicates that networks are significant in the
emergence and stabilization of communities and social diversity.
Our experimental results also provide valuable information about
strategies for developing network models and theories of evolutionary games and social dynamics.This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grants 61573064, 71631002, 71401037, and 11301032; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Beijing Nova Programme; and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Individual Discovery Grant). The Boston University work was supported by NSF Grants PHY-1505000, CMMI-1125290, and CHE- 1213217, and by Defense Threat Reduction Agency Grant HDTRA1-14-1-0017, and Department of Energy Contract DE-AC07-05Id14517. (61573064 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 71631002 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 71401037 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 11301032 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Beijing Nova Programme; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Individual Discovery Grant); PHY-1505000 - NSF; CMMI-1125290 - NSF; CHE-1213217 - NSF; HDTRA1-14-1-0017 - Defense Threat Reduction Agency; DE-AC07-05Id14517 - Department of Energy)Published versio
Evolutionary Dynamics of Populations with Conflicting Interactions: Classification and Analytical Treatment Considering Asymmetry and Power
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the
dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From
a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a
coordination or cooperation of interacting entities will occur, be it spins,
particles, bacteria, animals, or humans. Here, we analyze the case, where the
entities are heterogeneous, particularly the case of two populations with
conflicting interactions and two possible states. For such systems, explicit
mathematical formulas will be determined for the stationary solutions and the
associated eigenvalues, which determine their stability. In this way, four
different types of system dynamics can be classified, and the various kinds of
phase transitions between them will be discussed. While these results are
interesting from a physics point of view, they are also relevant for social,
economic, and biological systems, as they allow one to understand conditions
for (1) the breakdown of cooperation, (2) the coexistence of different
behaviors ("subcultures"), (2) the evolution of commonly shared behaviors
("norms"), and (4) the occurrence of polarization or conflict. We point out
that norms have a similar function in social systems that forces have in
physics
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Seshat: The Global History Databank
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today? Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much in their capacity to satisfy their members’ basic human needsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio
Coevolutionary games - a mini review
Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in
that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Favoring
players with higher fitness, the latter is key for understanding the challenges
faced by cooperators when competing with defectors. Evolutionary game theory
provides a competent theoretical framework for addressing the subtleties of
cooperation in such situations, which are known as social dilemmas. Recent
advances point towards the fact that the evolution of strategies alone may be
insufficient to fully exploit the benefits offered by cooperative behavior.
Indeed, while spatial structure and heterogeneity, for example, have been
recognized as potent promoters of cooperation, coevolutionary rules can extend
the potentials of such entities further, and even more importantly, lead to the
understanding of their emergence. The introduction of coevolutionary rules to
evolutionary games implies, that besides the evolution of strategies, another
property may simultaneously be subject to evolution as well. Coevolutionary
rules may affect the interaction network, the reproduction capability of
players, their reputation, mobility or age. Here we review recent works on
evolutionary games incorporating coevolutionary rules, as well as give a
didactic description of potential pitfalls and misconceptions associated with
the subject. In addition, we briefly outline directions for future research
that we feel are promising, thereby particularly focusing on dynamical effects
of coevolutionary rules on the evolution of cooperation, which are still widely
open to research and thus hold promise of exciting new discoveries.Comment: 24 two-column pages, 10 figures; accepted for publication in
BioSystem
Are Big Gods a big deal in the emergence of big groups?
In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research
Antisocial pool rewarding does not deter public cooperation
Rewarding cooperation is in many ways expected behaviour from social players.
However, strategies that promote antisocial behaviour are also surprisingly
common, not just in human societies, but also among eusocial insects and
bacteria. Examples include sanctioning of individuals who behave prosocially,
or rewarding of freeriders who do not contribute to collective enterprises. We
therefore study the public goods game with antisocial and prosocial pool
rewarding in order to determine the potential negative consequences on the
effectiveness of positive incentives to promote cooperation. Contrary to a
naive expectation, we show that the ability of defectors to distribute rewards
to their like does not deter public cooperation as long as cooperators are able
to do the same. Even in the presence of antisocial rewarding the spatial
selection for cooperation in evolutionary social dilemmas is enhanced. Since
the administration of rewards to either strategy requires a considerable degree
of aggregation, cooperators can enjoy the benefits of their prosocial
contributions as well as the corresponding rewards. Defectors when aggregated,
on the other hand, can enjoy antisocial rewards, but due to their lack of
contributions to the public good they ultimately succumb to their inherent
inability to secure a sustainable future. Strategies that facilitate the
aggregation of akin players, even if they seek to promote antisocial behaviour,
thus always enhance the long-term benefits of cooperation.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in
Proceedings of the Royal Society
Kinship, lineage identity, and an evolutionary perspective on the structure of cooperative big game hunting groups in Indonesia.
Work was conducted among traditional, subsistence whale hunters in Lamalera, Indonesia in order to test if kinship or lineage membership is more important for explaining the organization of cooperative hunting parties ranging in size from 8-14 men. Crew identifications were collected for all 853 hunts that occurred between May 3 and August 5, 1999. Lineage identity and genetic relatedness were determined for a sample of 189 hunters. Results of matrix regression show that kinship explains little of the hunters' affiliations independent of lineage identity. Crews are much more related amongst themselves than expected by chance. This is due, however, to the correlation between lineage membership and kinship. Lineage members are much more likely to affiliate in crews, but beyond r = 0.5 kin are just as likely not to affiliate. The results are discussed vis-à-vis the evolution of cooperation and group identity
Utility Rate Equations of Group Population Dynamics in Biological and Social Systems
We present a novel system of equations to describe the evolution of
self-organized structured societies (biological or human) composed of several
trait groups. The suggested approach is based on the combination of ideas
employed in the theory of biological populations, system theory, and utility
theory. The evolution equations are defined as utility rate equations, whose
parameters are characterized by the utility of each group with respect to the
society as a whole and by the mutual utilities of groups with respect to each
other. We analyze in detail the cases of two groups (cooperators and defectors)
and of three groups (cooperators, defectors, and regulators) and find that, in
a self-organized society, neither defectors nor regulators can overpass the
maximal fractions of about 10% each. This is in agreement with the data for bee
and ant colonies. The classification of societies by their distance from
equilibrium is proposed. We apply the formalism to rank the countries according
to the introduced metric quantifying their relative stability, which depends on
the cost of defectors and regulators as well as their respective population
fractions. We find a remarkable concordance with more standard economic ranking
based, for instance, on GDP per capita.Comment: Latex file, 39 pages, 8 figure
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