2014/12/12 by Attila Szolnoki, Matjaz Perc, Matjaž Perc · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Computer science #Conformity #Economics #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Geography #Herding #Mathematical economics #Microeconomics #Population #Psychology #Public good #Public goods game #Reciprocity (cultural anthropology) #Social dilemma #Social psychology #Sociology #Stochastic game #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1098/rsif.2014.1299
published as J. R. Soc. Interface 12 (2015) 20141299 · 8 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Journal of the Royal Society Interface
arxiv created 2014/12/12 · arxiv updated 2014/12/23 · openalex publication_date 2014/12/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The pursuit of highest payoffs in evolutionary social dilemmas is risky and sometimes inferior to conformity. Choosing the most common strategy within the interaction range is safer because it ensures that the payoff of an individual will not be much lower than average. Herding instincts and crowd behaviour in humans and social animals also compel to conformity in their own right. Motivated by these facts, we here study the impact of conformity on the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas. We show that an appropriate fraction of conformists within the population introduces an effective surface tension around cooperative clusters and ensures smooth interfaces between different strategy domains. Payoff-driven players brake the symmetry in favour of cooperation and enable an expansion of clusters past the boundaries imposed by traditional network reciprocity. This mechanism works even under the most testing conditions, and it is robust against variations of the interaction network as long as degree-normalized payoffs are applied. Conformity may thus be beneficial for the resolution of social dilemmas.