Wisdom of groups promotes cooperation in evolutionary social dilemmas

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating the 'wisdom of groups' into evolutionary social dilemma models significantly promotes cooperation by slowing defector invasion and enhancing spatial reciprocity, regardless of interaction type.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach showing how group knowledge influences strategy evolution, promoting cooperation in social dilemmas across different interaction frameworks.

Findings

Group knowledge impairs defector invasion

Spatial reciprocity is strengthened by group wisdom

Decentralized decision making benefits cooperation

Abstract

Whether or not to change strategy depends not only on the personal success of each individual, but also on the success of others. Using this as motivation, we study the evolution of cooperation in games that describe social dilemmas, where the propensity to adopt a different strategy depends both on individual fitness as well as on the strategies of neighbors. Regardless of whether the evolutionary process is governed by pairwise or group interactions, we show that plugging into the "wisdom of groups" strongly promotes cooperative behavior. The more the wider knowledge is taken into account the more the evolution of defectors is impaired. We explain this by revealing a dynamically decelerated invasion process, by means of which interfaces separating different domains remain smooth and defectors therefore become unable to efficiently invade cooperators. This in turn invigorates spatial reciprocity and establishes decentralized decision making as very beneficial for resolving social dilemmas.