Friendship, cliquishness, and the emergence of cooperation.
The evolution of cooperation is a central problem in biology and the social sciences. While theoretical work using the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) has shown that cooperation among non-kin can be sustained among reciprocal strategies (i.e. tit-for-tat), these results are sensitive to errors in strategy execution, cyclical invasions by free riders, and the specific ecology of strategies. Moreover, the IPD assumes that a strategy's probability of playing the PD game with other individuals is independent of the decisions made by others. Here, we remove the assumption of independent pairing by studying a more plausible cooperative dilemma in which players can preferentially interact with a limited set of known partners and also deploy longer-term accounting strategies that can counteract the effects of random errors. We show that cooperative strategies readily emerge and persist in a range of noisy environments, with successful cooperative strategies (henceforth, cliquers) maintaining medium-term memories for partners and low thresholds for acceptable cooperation (i.e. forgiveness). The success of these strategies relies on their cliquishness-a propensity to defect with strangers if they already have an adequate number of partners. Notably, this combination of medium-term accounting, forgiveness, and cliquishness fits with empirical studies of friendship and other long-term relationships among humans.
Hruschka
Daniel J
DJ
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, 1557 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. dhrusch@sph.emory.edu
Henrich
Joseph
J
D000533:Altruism; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D033062:Friends; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008568:Memory; D008960:Models, Psychological