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Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions

How cooperation emerges in human societies is both an evolutionary enigma and a practical problem with tangible implications for societal health. Population structure has long been recognized as a catalyst for cooperation because local interactions facilitate reciprocity. Analysis of population stru...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Su, Qi, Allen, Benjamin, Plotkin, Joshua B.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: National Academy of Sciences 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8740725/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34983850
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2113468118
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author Su, Qi
Allen, Benjamin
Plotkin, Joshua B.
author_facet Su, Qi
Allen, Benjamin
Plotkin, Joshua B.
author_sort Su, Qi
collection PubMed
description How cooperation emerges in human societies is both an evolutionary enigma and a practical problem with tangible implications for societal health. Population structure has long been recognized as a catalyst for cooperation because local interactions facilitate reciprocity. Analysis of population structure typically assumes bidirectional social interactions. But human social interactions are often unidirectional—where one individual has the opportunity to contribute altruistically to another, but not conversely—as the result of organizational hierarchies, social stratification, popularity effects, and endogenous mechanisms of network growth. Here we expand the theory of cooperation in structured populations to account for both uni- and bidirectional social interactions. Even though unidirectional interactions remove the opportunity for reciprocity, we find that cooperation can nonetheless be favored in directed social networks and that cooperation is provably maximized for networks with an intermediate proportion of unidirectional interactions, as observed in many empirical settings. We also identify two simple structural motifs that allow efficient modification of interaction directions to promote cooperation by orders of magnitude. We discuss how our results relate to the concepts of generalized and indirect reciprocity.
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spelling pubmed-87407252022-06-30 Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions Su, Qi Allen, Benjamin Plotkin, Joshua B. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Biological Sciences How cooperation emerges in human societies is both an evolutionary enigma and a practical problem with tangible implications for societal health. Population structure has long been recognized as a catalyst for cooperation because local interactions facilitate reciprocity. Analysis of population structure typically assumes bidirectional social interactions. But human social interactions are often unidirectional—where one individual has the opportunity to contribute altruistically to another, but not conversely—as the result of organizational hierarchies, social stratification, popularity effects, and endogenous mechanisms of network growth. Here we expand the theory of cooperation in structured populations to account for both uni- and bidirectional social interactions. Even though unidirectional interactions remove the opportunity for reciprocity, we find that cooperation can nonetheless be favored in directed social networks and that cooperation is provably maximized for networks with an intermediate proportion of unidirectional interactions, as observed in many empirical settings. We also identify two simple structural motifs that allow efficient modification of interaction directions to promote cooperation by orders of magnitude. We discuss how our results relate to the concepts of generalized and indirect reciprocity. National Academy of Sciences 2021-12-30 2022-01-04 /pmc/articles/PMC8740725/ /pubmed/34983850 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2113468118 Text en Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Biological Sciences
Su, Qi
Allen, Benjamin
Plotkin, Joshua B.
Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
title Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
title_full Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
title_fullStr Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
title_full_unstemmed Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
title_short Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
title_sort evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions
topic Biological Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8740725/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34983850
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2113468118
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