TL;DR
This paper models how beneficial and harmful contagions influence the evolution of social behavior, revealing a social dilemma where evolutionarily stable strategies differ from collective optima.
Contribution
It introduces a multi-timescale model combining contagion dynamics, evolutionary game theory, and adaptive dynamics to analyze sociality evolution under contagion pressures.
Findings
Evolutionarily stable sociality levels often differ from social optima.
The direction of deviation depends on contagion spread rates.
Contagion influences social structure evolution but may prevent optimal social configurations.
Abstract
Levels of sociality in nature vary widely. Some species are solitary; others live in family groups; some form complex multi-family societies. Increased levels of social interaction can allow for the spread of useful innovations and beneficial information, but can also facilitate the spread of harmful contagions, such as infectious diseases. It is natural to assume that these contagion processes shape the evolution of complex social systems, but an explicit account of the dynamics of sociality under selection pressure imposed by contagion remains elusive. We consider a model for the evolution of sociality strategies in the presence of both a beneficial and costly contagion. We study the dynamics of this model at three timescales: using a susceptible-infectious-susceptible (SIS) model to describe contagion spread for given sociality strategies, a replicator equation to study the…
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