title: Conformity enhances network reciprocity in evolutionary social dilemmas.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, PO Box 49, 1525 Budapest, Hungary szolnoki@mfa.kfki.hu.
authors.forename: Attila
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0907-0406
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Szolnoki
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia CAMTP-Center for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Maribor, Krekova 2, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia matjaz.perc@uni-mb.si.
authors.forename: Matjaž
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3087-541X
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perc
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012944:Social Support
keywords: conformity; cooperation; evolutionary games; network reciprocity; social dilemmas