October 2 (10:00-11:00) room C.510
Péter Harta (University of Pannonia, Hungary)
Crossing the Threshold from Selfishness to Collective Cooperation
The process of self-organization of heterogeneous individuals is important, as their team structure – formed by their self-organizing process – shapes their ability to survive [1-3]. While cooperation may arise in a well-structured population, defection and rationality tend to prevail in self-organizing groups due to natural selection [4-6]. In such environments, ecological constraints promote cooperation primarily at the pairwise level – where survival depends on the quality of pairwise synergy [7] – which later expand into small cooperative clusters [8-10]. In this study, we demonstrate that cooperation in heterogeneous networks [5,11] can emerge through a self-organizing process that crosses a critical threshold and manifests as a phase transition within a finite number of steps. However, if agents fail to transcend bounded rationality, cooperation remains only superficial, masking an underlying dominance of self-serving strategies. Behavioral experiments with small groups fit these findings: cooperation consistently emerged in groups with heterogeneous behavioral types and a sufficiently high degree of disillusionment with selfish strategies.
1. Campo, A., Garnier, S., Dédriche, O., Zekkri, M. & Dorigo, M. Self-Organized Discrimination of Resources. PLoS One 6, e19888 (2011).
2. Scott, M., & Pitt, J. Interdependent self-organizing mechanisms for cooperative survival. Artificial Life 29, 198-234 (2023).
3. Santos, F. C., Santos, M. D. & Pacheco, J. M. Social diversity promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games. Nature 454, 213-216 (2008).
4. Li, A., et al. Evolution of cooperation on temporal networks. Nat. Commun. 11, 2259 (2020).
5. Li, J., Wang, X., Li, C., & Zhang, B. Replicator dynamics on heterogeneous networks. J. Math. Biol. 90, 16 (2025).
6. Rand, D. G. & Nowak, M. A. Human cooperation. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 413-425 (2013).
7. Liemhetcharat, S., & Veloso, M. Weighted synergy graphs for effective team formation with heterogeneous ad hoc agents. Artificial Intelligence 208, 41-65 (2014).
8. Meng, Y., Cornelius, S. P., Liu, Y. Y., & Li, A. Dynamics of collective cooperation under personalised strategy updates. Nat. Commun. 15, 3125 (2024).
9. Su, Q., McAvoy, A. & Plotkin, J. B. Strategy evolution on dynamic networks. Nat. Comput. Sci. 3, 763–776 (2023).
10. Stasser, G., & Abele, S. Collective choice, collaboration, and communication. Annual Review of Psychology 71, 589-612 (2020).11. 11. Liu, S., Zhang, L. & Wang, B. Individual diversity between interdependent networks promotes the evolution of cooperation by means of mixed coupling. Sci. Rep. 9, 11163 (2019).