Cooperation and the Emergence of Role Differentiation in the Dynamics of Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper uses computer simulations to explore how cooperation and social roles like leaders, conformists, and exploiters emerge and stabilize in evolving social networks modeled by a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma.

Contribution

It introduces a new coevolutionary model showing how social differentiation and hierarchical structures naturally arise from local interactions.

Findings

Leaders emerge as high-payoff individuals who influence others.

The social network can develop small-world topology.

Disrupting leaders can trigger social crises and cascades.

Abstract

By means of extensive computer simulations, the authors consider the entangled coevolution of actions and social structure in a new version of a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma model that naturally gives way to a process of social differentiation. Diverse social roles emerge from the dynamics of the system: leaders are individuals getting a large payoff who are imitated by a considerable fraction of the population, conformists are unsatisfied cooperative agents that keep cooperating, and exploiters are defectors with a payoff larger than the average one obtained by cooperators. The dynamics generate a social network that can have the topology of a small world network. The network has a strong hierarchical structure in which the leaders play an essential role in sustaining a highly cooperative stable regime. But disruptions affecting leaders produce social crises described as dynamical cascades that propagate through the network.