this paper first focuses on the necessity of cooperation among human beings, and then offers objective and subjective reasons for higher cooperation among human beings compared to animals. the paper tries to proove that cooperation precedes war and is more normal than the latter. ln fact, the history of war and conflict both is shorter than the war in human societies, and more exceptional. war,...

We study the evolution of the social norm of “cooperation” in a dynamic environment. Each agent lives for two periods and interacts with agents from the previous and next generations via a coordination game. Social norms emerge as patterns of behavior that are stable in part due to agents’ interpretations of private information about the past, which are influenced by occasional past behaviors t...

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity and their importance, social dilemmas have been studied by economists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. These studies typical...

The existence of social norms is one of the big unsolved problems in social cognitive science. Although no other concept is invoked more frequently in the social sciences, we still know little about how social norms are formed, the forces determining their content, and the cognitive and emotional requirements that enable a species to establish and enforce social norms. In recent years, there ha...

We analyse the role of uncertainty in a sequential game where players have to decide whether to contribute to a public project or not. A player’s payoff may depend on his belief about the other player’s action which allows us to model social pressure. Using the theory of psychological games, we show that the players’ propensity to choose an individually costly action such as cooperation in a pu...

Fashion plays such a crucial rule in the evolution of culture and society that it is regarded as a second nature to the human being. Also, its impact on economy is quite nontrivial. On what is fashionable, interestingly, there are two viewpoints that are both extremely widespread but almost opposite: conformists think that what is popular is fashionable, while rebels believe that being differen...

Cooperation is central to human societies. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision making. Does cooperation require deliberate self-restraint? Or is spontaneous prosociality reined in by calculating self-interest? Here we present a theory of why (and for whom) intuition favors cooperation: cooperation is typically advantageous in everyday life, l...

W study the problem of cooperative behavior emerging in an environment where individual behaviors and interaction structures coevolve. Players not only learn which strategy to adopt by imitating the strategy of the best-performing player they observe, but also choose with whom they should interact by selectively creating and/or severing ties with other players based on a myopic cost-benefit com...

Evolution of cooperation is a fundamental question of socio-biology. Intrinsic factors like kinship play an important role in cooperation among selfish individuals. External factors like uncertainty and the structure of the social interaction network also contribute significantly to the evolution of cooperation. Here I use agent-based simulations to generate artificial social networks. I show t...

Introducing the concept of replication strategies this paper studies the evolution of cooperation in populations of agents whose offspring follow a social strategy that is determined by a parent’s replication strategy. Importantly, social and replication strategies may differ, thus allowing parents to construct their own social niche, defined by the behaviour of their offspring. We analyse the ...