Cooperative evolution with opinion formation in a complex social environment

Abstract

Cooperation is a significant aspect in the daily activities of human or animal populations that involves the process of agents making decisions based in part on the ideas or beliefs of cooperators. The importance of communication in the evolutionary game cannot be overstated. In this paper, we offer a co-evolutionary game model on a communication network, including expressed and private opinions. Then, we present our theoretical analysis of scenarios characterized by different parameters, elucidating the relationship between the agents’ opinion formation process and the decision-making process. Finally, we run simulations with our proposed model. Surprisingly, we discover that whereas communication does not increase cooperation on Erdös–Rényi random networks, it does so on the Barabási–Albert scale-free network. Meanwhile, we discover that in the simulation results, the average of private opinions (simplified as values within [0,1]) changes in the same direction of the percentage of cooperators. Furthermore, we discover that deceivers who conceal their true private opinions may, to some extent, foster the formation of collaboration in the human population, which goes against our common sense.