Evolution of Human-like Social Grooming Strategies regarding Richness and Group Size

TL;DR

This paper models the evolution of social grooming strategies in humans, revealing four classes of strategies, including a human-like power-law distribution, influenced by resource constraints and group size, shedding light on social brain evolution.

Contribution

It introduces an individual-based evolutionary game model that identifies four classes of social grooming strategies, including a human-like power-law strategy, based on resource and group size factors.

Findings

Four classes of social grooming strategies identified.

Power-law distribution similar to human social relationships.

Resource constraints influence strategy evolution.

Abstract

Human beings tend to cooperate with close friends, therefore they have to construct strong social relationships to recieve cooperation from others. Therefore they should have acquired their strategies of social relationship construction through an evolutionary process. The behavior of social relationship construction is know as "social grooming." In this paper, we show that there are four classes including a human-like strategy in evolutionary dynamics of social grooming strategies based on an evolutionary game simulation. Social relationship strengths (as measured by frequency of social grooming) often show a much skewed distribution (a power law distribution). It may be due to time costs constraints on social grooming, because the costs are too large to ignore for having many strong social relationships. Evolution of humans' strategies of construction of social relationships may explain the origin of human intelligence based on a social brain hypothesis. We constructed an individual-based model to explore the evolutionary dynamics of social grooming strategies. The model is based on behavior to win over others by strengthening social relationships with cooperators. The results of evolutionary simulations show the four classes of evolutionary dynamics. The results depend on total resources and the ratio of each cooperator's resource to the number of cooperators. One of the four classes is similar to a human strategy, i.e. the strategies based on the Yule--Simon process of power law.