Abstract
According to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651, English ed.: Touchstone, New York, 2008), “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, and it would need powerful social institutions to establish social order. In reality, however, social cooperation can also arise spontaneously, based on local interactions rather than centralized control. The self-organization of cooperative behavior is particularly puzzling for social dilemmas related to sharing natural resources or creating common goods. Such situations are often described by the prisoner’s dilemma. Here, we report the sudden outbreak of predominant cooperation in a noisy world dominated by selfishness and defection, when individuals imitate superior strategies and show success-driven migration. In our model, individuals are unrelated, and do not inherit behavioral traits. They defect or cooperate selfishly when the opportunity arises, and they do not know how often they will interact or have interacted with someone else. Moreover, our individuals have no reputation mechanism to form friendship networks, nor do they have the option of voluntary interaction or costly punishment. Therefore, the outbreak of prevailing cooperation, when directed motion is integrated in a game-theoretical model, is remarkable, particularly when random strategy mutations and random relocations challenge the formation and survival of cooperative clusters. Our results suggest that mobility is significant for the evolution of social order, and essential for its stabilization and maintenance.
This chapter reprints a previous publication with kind permission of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. It is requested to cite this work as follows: D. Helbing and W. Yu, The outbreak of cooperation among success-driven individuals under noisy conditions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106(8), 3680–3685 (2009).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
M.C. Gonzáles, C.A. Hidalgo, A.L. Barabási, Understanding individual human mobility patterns. Nature 453, 779–782 (2008)
L. Hufnagel, D. Brockmann, T. Geisel, The scaling laws of human travel. Nature 439, 462–465 (2006)
M. Batty, Cities and Complexity (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005)
W. Weidlich, Sociodynamics. A Systematic Approach to Mathematical Modelling in the Social Sciences (Harwood Academic, Amsterdam, 2000)
D. Pumain (ed.), Spatial Analysis and Population Dynamics (John Libbey Eurotext, France, 1991)
J.V. Neumann, O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 1944)
R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, New York, 1984)
B. Skyrms, Evolution of The Social Contract (Cambridge University, New York, 1996)
A. Flache, R. Hegselmann, Do irregular grids make a difference? Relaxing the spatial regularity assumption in cellular models of social dynamics. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simulat. 4(4) (2001)
J.M. Epstein, Zones of cooperation in demographic prisoner’s dilemma. Complexity 4(2), 36–48 (1998)
L.A. Dugatkin, D.S. Wilson, ROVER: A strategy for exploiting cooperators in a patchy environment. Am. Naturalist 138(3), 687–701 (1991)
M. Enquist, O. Leimar, The evolution of cooperation in mobile organisms. Animal Behav. 45, 747–757 (1993)
J.-F. Le Galliard, R. Ferrière, U. Dieckmann, Adaptive evolution of social traits: Origin, trajectories, and correlations of altruism and mobility. Am. Naturalist 165(2), 206–224 (2005)
T. Reichenbach, M. Mobilia, E. Frey, Mobility promotes and jeopardizes biodiversity in rock-paper-scissors games. Nature 448, 1046–1049 (2007)
C.A. Aktipis, Know when to walk away: contingent movement and the evolution of cooperation. J. Theor. Biol. 231, 249–260 (2004)
M.H. Vainstein, A.T.C. Silva, J.J. Arenzon, Does mobility decrease cooperation? J. Theor. Biol. 244, 722–728 (2007)
M.A. Nowak, Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science 314, 1560–1563 (2006)
A. Traulsen, M.A. Nowak, Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 103, 10952–10955 (2006)
E. Fehr, S. Gächter, Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature 415, 137–140 (2002)
R. Boyd, H. Gintis, S. Bowles, P.J. Richerson, The evolution of altruistic punishment. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 100, 3531–3535 (2003)
M.A. Nowak, R.M. May, Evolutionary games and spatial chaos. Nature 359, 826–829 (1992)
G. Szabó, C. Hauert, Phase transitions and volunteering in spatial public goods games. Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 118101 (2002)
C. Hauert, M. Doebeli, Spatial structure often inhibits the evolution of cooperation in the snowdrift game. Nature 428, 643–646 (2004)
M.H. Vainstein, J.J. Arenzon, Disordered environments in spatial games. Phys. Rev. E 64, 051905 (2001)
D. Helbing, W. Yu, Migration as a mechanism to promote cooperation. Adv. Complex Syst. 11(4), 641–652 (2008)
H.P. Young, Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 1998)
N.S. Glance, B.A. Huberman, The outbreak of cooperation. J. Math. Soc. 17(4), 281–302 (1993)
C. Hauert, Fundamental clusters in spatial 2 ×2 games. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 268, 761–769 (2000)
T.C. Schelling, Dynamic models of segregation. J. Math. Sociol. 1, 143–186 (1971)
J.L. Deneubourg, A. Lioni, C. Detrain, Dynamics of aggregation and emergence of cooperation. Biol. Bull. 202, 262–267 (2002)
M.A. Nowak, K. Sigmund, Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring. Nature 393, 573–577 (1998)
M. Milinski, D. Semmann, H.J. Krambeck, Reputation helps solve the “tragedy of the commons”. Nature 415, 424–426 (2002)
B. Rockenbach, M. Milinski, The efficient interaction of indirect reciprocity and costly punishment. Nature 444, 718–723 (2006)
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Christoph Hauert, Heiko Rauhut, Sergi Lozano, Michael Maes, Carlos P. Roca, and Didier Sornette for their comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Helbing, D. (2012). Co-evolution of Social Behavior and Spatial Organization. In: Helbing, D. (eds) Social Self-Organization. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24004-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24004-1_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24003-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24004-1
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)