Spontaneous similarity discrimination in the evolution of cooperation

Colman, Andrew M.; Browning, Lindsay; Pulford, Briony D.

doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.05.022

Cited by 26 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Nevertheless, neither drifters that are strategic in behavior (behaving less altruistically in non-natal colonies) nor spiteful; (reducing fitness of non-natal colonies) prevent drifting from evolving through gains from indirect reciprocity. Previously cheating has been shown to be less likely when the cost of the beneficial act is small and reciprocators can be identified by an honest phenotypic marker or "tag" (Riolo et al, 2001;Colman et al, 2012). In the case of worker drifting, the cost is arguably trivial to nonexistent.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also, the tag in this case is simple and honest: a willingness to accept drifters. Reciprocating nests would be evident in the population by their relaxed acceptance threshold levels (Reeve, 1989;Masuda and Ohtsuki, 2007;Colman et al, 2012). There would be no need to evolve specific phenotypic markers, learn to recognize reciprocators, or to punish cheaters.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Go High or Go Low? Adaptive Evolution of High and Low Relatedness Societies in Social Hymenoptera

Nonacs

2017

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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Cooperative groups can increase fitness either by helping kin or interacting with unlike individuals to produce social heterosis. They cannot, however, simultaneously maximize both benefits. This tradeoff between nepotism and diversity is modeled using Hamilton's rule (rb-c > 0), by allowing benefit and cost to be dynamic functions of relatedness (i.e., social heterosis predicts b and c depend on r). Simulations show that evolutionary outcomes tend to maximize either nepotism (with high genetic relatedness), or social heterosis (with low relatedness) rather than produce an intermediate outcome. Although genetic diversity can arise through multiple mating, a second possible mechanism-the exchanging of individuals across groups-is similarly effective. Such worker "drifting" is common in many species of social Hymenoptera and may be a form of indirect reciprocity. Drifting individuals increase an unrelated group's productivity by enhancing its genetic diversity, with this effect being reciprocated by other unrelated drifters entering their natal group. The benefits from social heterosis and indirect reciprocity are robust against cheating and show that it is possible to evolve stable cooperation between individuals that are genetically distant or unrelated. As drifting becomes more prevalent colony boundaries may become weakly discriminated, which may predispose toward the evolution of unicoloniality in some species.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Go High or Go Low? Adaptive Evolution of High and Low Relatedness Societies in Social Hymenoptera

Nonacs

2017

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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“…There is a small, but growing, number of models explicitly based on other games. Colman et al (2012) tested six games with speci c payo s that can be classi ed into versions of both dilemmas and co-ordination games. The analysis was however restricted to such small populations that inclusive tness is at work.…”

Section: Previous Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What games support the evolution of an ingroup bias?

Jansson

2015

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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There is an increasing wealth of models trying to explain the evolution of group discrimination and an ingroup bias. This paper sets out to systematically investigate the most fundamental assumption in these models: in what kind of situations do the interactions take place? What strategic structures -games -support the evolution of an ingroup bias? More speci cally, the aim here is to nd the prerequisites for when a bias also with respect to minimal groups -arbitrarily de ned groups void of group-speci c qualities -is selected for, and which cannot be ascribed to kin selection.Through analyses and simulations of minimal models of two-person games, this paper indicates that only some games are conducive to the evolution of ingroup favouritism. In particular, this class does not contain the prisoners' dilemma, but it does contain antico-ordination and co-ordination games. Contrasting to the prisoners' dilemma, these are games where it is not a matter of whether to behave altruistically, but rather one of predicting what the other person will be doing, and where I would bene t from you knowing my intentions.In anti-co-ordination games, on average, not only will agents discriminate between groups, but also in such a way that their choices maximise the sum of the available payo s towards the ingroup more often than towards the outgroup. And in co-ordination games, even if agents do manage to co-ordinate with the whole population, they are more likely to co-ordinate on the socially optimal equilibrium within their group. Simulations show that this occurs most often in games where there is a component of risktaking, and thus trust, involved. A typical such game is the stag hunt or assurance game.Keywords ethnocentrism, minimal groups, cooperation, replicator dynamics, assurance game Graphical Abstract Both analyses and simulations show that an ingroup bias evolves in (anti-)co-ordination games. The simulations further show that the strategy becomes particularly prevalent in stag hunts. The picture depicts, to the left, the games derived from the game matrix, in the middle, for di erent values of x and y. The panel to the right shows the simulated proportional prevalence of an ingroup bias for the di erent games when there are ten groups in the population.

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“…The (far from straightforward) computational implementation of the argument amounts to a certificate of its soundness, but the relevance of the argument to cooperation in human and animal populations is limited by the requirement that the cooperating players have to be literally identical. However, if the cost of cooperation is c and the benefit to the other player(s) is b, with c < b as before, it is easy to prove that the payoff from cooperation exceeds that from defection whenever p > (b + c)/2b, where p is the probability that both players will choose the same strategy, and there is strong evidence from computational simulations with social dilemmas and a variety of other games that similarity discrimination evolves spontaneously and powerfully in the process of natural selection, with players cooperating selectively with co-players who are similar but not necessarily identical to themselves (Colman, Browning, & Pulford, 2012). It seems reasonable to conclude that similarity discrimination helps to explain cooperation and its evolution.…”

Section: Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Problems and Pseudo-Problems in Understanding Cooperation in Social Dilemmas

Colman

Pulford

2012

Psychological Inquiry

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Social dilemmas do not need to be solved by social projection or any other special mechanism or theory, because they are fully and unambiguously solved by the standard game-theoretic concept of strategic dominance. The real problems lie in explaining why human decision makers do not invariably choose the dominant-strategy solutions that are mandated by game theory, but those problems require explanation of the decision making of human agents with bounded rationality rather than any new solution of social dilemmas. The most influential explanations for the empirical findings are reciprocity, inclusive fitness, other-regarding preferences, team reasoning (properly understood in a way that escapes the criticism of it made in the target article), and similarity, with or without the social projection hypothesis.

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Spontaneous similarity discrimination in the evolution of cooperation

Cited by 26 publications

References 31 publications

Go High or Go Low? Adaptive Evolution of High and Low Relatedness Societies in Social Hymenoptera

Go High or Go Low? Adaptive Evolution of High and Low Relatedness Societies in Social Hymenoptera

What games support the evolution of an ingroup bias?

Problems and Pseudo-Problems in Understanding Cooperation in Social Dilemmas

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