Cooperation and social organization depend on weighing private and public reputations

TL;DR

The paper explores how cooperation and social organization depend on balancing personal experiences and public reputation information from friends and enemies.

Contribution

The study introduces evolutionary agent-based simulations to analyze how different information prioritization strategies affect cooperation and social stability.

Findings

Prioritizing public information and using friend-and-enemy heuristics leads to polarization cycles and defector invasions.

Using friend-focused heuristics and private experiences results in stable and prosperous cooperative populations.

Combining personal experiences with friends' opinions promotes large-scale cooperation.

Abstract

To avoid exploitation by defectors, people can use past experiences with others when deciding to cooperate or not (‘private information’). Alternatively, people can derive others’ reputation from ‘public’ information provided by individuals within the social network. However, public information may be aligned or misaligned with one’s own private experiences and different individuals, such as ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, may have different opinions about the reputation of others. Using evolutionary agent-based simulations, we examine how cooperation and social organization is shaped when agents (1) prioritize private or public information about others’ reputation, and (2) integrate others’ opinions using a friend-focused or a friend-and-enemy focused heuristic (relying on reputation information from only friends or also enemies, respectively). When agents prioritize public information and rely on friend-and-enemy heuristics, we observe polarization cycles marked by high cooperation, invasion by defectors, and subsequent population fragmentation. Prioritizing private information diminishes polarization and defector invasions, but also results in limited cooperation. Only when using friend-focused heuristics and following past experiences or the recommendation of friends create prosperous and stable populations based on cooperation. These results show how combining one’s own experiences and the opinions of friends can lead to stable and large-scale cooperation and highlight the important role of following the advice of friends in the evolution of group cooperation.

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