Imitating emotions instead of strategies in spatial games elevates social welfare

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that imitating emotional responses like goodwill and envy, rather than pure strategies, enhances cooperation and social welfare in spatial social dilemma games.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of imitating emotional profiles instead of strategies, showing improved cooperation in structured populations.

Findings

Imitating emotions reestablishes cooperation in social dilemmas.

Emotional imitation outperforms strategy imitation in structured populations.

Emotional profiles facilitate resolving social dilemmas without added complexity.

Abstract

The success of imitation as an evolutionary driving force in spatial games has often been questioned, especially for social dilemmas such as the snowdrift game, where the most profitable may be the mixed phase sustaining both the cooperative as well as the defective strategy. Here we reexamine this assumption by investigating the evolution of cooperation in spatial social dilemma games, where instead of pure strategies players can adopt emotional profiles of their neighbors. For simplicity, the emotional profile of each player is determined by two pivotal factors only, namely how it behaves towards less and how towards more successful neighbors. We find that imitating emotions such as goodwill and envy instead of pure strategies from the more successful players reestablishes imitation as a tour de force for resolving social dilemmas on structured populations without any additional assumptions or strategic complexity.