Negotiation and appeasement can be more effective drivers of sociality than kin selection

Abstract

Two alternative frameworks explain the evolution of cooperation in the face of conflicting interests. Conflicts can be alleviated by kinship, the alignment of interests by virtue of shared genes, or by negotiation strategies, allowing mutually beneficial trading of services or commodities. Although negotiation often occurs in kin-structured populations, the interplay of kin-and negotiation-based mechanisms in the evolution of cooperation remains an unresolved issue. Inspired by the biology of a cooperatively breeding fish, we developed an individual-based simulation model to study the evolution of negotiation-based cooperation in relation to different levels of genetic relatedness. We show that the evolution of negotiation strategies leads to an equilibrium where subordinates appease dominants by conditional cooperation, resulting in high levels of help and low levels of aggression. This negotiation-based equilibrium can be reached both in the absence of relatedness and in a kin-structured population. However, when relatedness is high, evolution often ends up in an alternative equilibrium where subordinates help their kin unconditionally. The level of help at this kin-selected equilibrium is considerably lower than at the negotiation-based equilibrium, and it corresponds to a level reached when responsiveness is prevented from evolving in the simulations. A mathematical invasion analysis reveals that, quite generally, the alignment of payoffs due to the relatedness of interaction partners tends to impede selection for harsh but effective punishment of defectors. Hence kin structure will often hamper rather than facilitate the evolution of productive cooperation.

Cheating and punishment in cooperative animal societies

“…B 371: 20150090 them, increasing their levels of effort only when the dominants were restored [58,61]. Although these studies do not demonstrate that cheating itself should be selectively favoured (or, indeed, that cheating occurs) under natural conditions, they provide strong behavioural evidence that dominants can, and do, monitor the actions of subordinate group members; and that aggression by dominants can induce cooperation by subordinates [30,[62][63][64].…”

Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation

“…Reciprocity, the third potential cause of correlated pay-offs, is arguably the most contended possibility to generate cooperation and altruism [12,32]. It is the theme of this article and a focus of many contributions to this special issue of the Philosophical Transactions [7,[33][34][35][36][37].…”

Evolutionary Dynamics of Coordinated Cooperation

“…Similar phenomena, though the modeling framework is quite different from the current one, were found in the continuous-time, two-player "coaction" model by van Doorn et al (2014), where the authors found that (i) real time coaction in response to partner's behavior (analogous to my negotiation stage) generally favors cooperation but that (ii) once delay in information about the behavior of one's partner is introduced, as is often the case with discrete-round repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games, achieving cooperation becomes more difficult. Therefore, the introduction of a negotiation stage, if the possibility of lying is suppressed by some mechanism such as punishment Quiñones et al, 2016) or ostracism (Nakamaru and Yokoyama, 2014), contributes to enhancing the efficiency of conditional cooperation. It is notable that my model explains the presence of conditional cooperation not as an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS).…”

“…There is a growing interest in studying negotiation processes to see how flexibility in behavior shapes an evolutionary outcome (McNamara et al, 1999;McNamara, 2013;Quiñones et al, 2016;Ito et al, 2017). My negotiation model here is such an attempt to reveal the origin of conditional cooperators and to explain why we observe both cooperation and defection in the real world.…”