Conformity-Driven Agents Support Ordered Phases in the Spatial Public Goods Game

TL;DR

This paper explores how conformity-driven agents influence the emergence of ordered cooperative phases in the spatial Public Goods Game, revealing that conformism promotes cooperation and can cause bistability in social systems.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining fitness-driven and conformity-driven agents, showing how social conformity impacts phase transitions and stability in the Public Goods Game.

Findings

Conformity promotes ordered cooperative phases.

Conformism can lead to bistable states.

The presence of conformity influences phase transition nature.

Abstract

We investigate the spatial Public Goods Game in the presence of fitness-driven and conformity-driven agents. This framework usually considers only the former type of agents, i.e., agents that tend to imitate the strategy of their fittest neighbors. However, whenever we study social systems, the evolution of a population might be affected also by social behaviors as conformism, stubbornness, altruism, and selfishness. Although the term evolution can assume different meanings depending on the considered domain, here it corresponds to the set of processes that lead a system towards an equilibrium or a steady-state. We map fitness to the agents' payoff so that richer agents are those most imitated by fitness-driven agents, while conformity-driven agents tend to imitate the strategy assumed by the majority of their neighbors. Numerical simulations aim to identify the nature of the transition, on varying the amount of the relative density of conformity-driven agents in the population, and to study the nature of related equilibria. Remarkably, we find that conformism generally fosters ordered cooperative phases and may also lead to bistable behaviors.