Speaker
Description
Human and non-human animals form structured social systems in which individuals interact preferentially within groups shaped by environmental structure, movement, and social preferences. To study how structure and mobility affect collective behaviour and the evolution of cooperation, we consider a model in which individuals move across nodes of a spatial network representing interaction sites (e.g., resource patches or social hubs). Those at the same node engage in a multiplayer game capturing conflict between individual and collective interests arising from resource production and shared use, and their behaviour evolves through selection. This work identifies community structure and conditional movement as two distinct yet complementary mechanisms, in which network structure and evolution interplay differently to sustain cooperation. First, under limited independent movement, populations form separate communities, leading to a nested evolutionary process. Although defection holds an advantage within communities, cooperation spreads effectively between them. Consequently, small communities sustain cooperation, independent of network topology. Second, under conditional (Markov) movement, individuals move based on satisfaction with current group composition. Cooperation co-evolves with high mobility, as cooperators find each other while avoiding defectors. In contrast to the first mechanism, less network degree heterogeneity and low movement costs are key drivers.
References:
Pires DL, Broom M (2024) The rules of multiplayer cooperation in networks of communities. PLoS Comput Biol 20(8): e1012388. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012388
Pires DL, Erovenko IV, Broom M (2023) Network topology and movement cost, not updating mechanism, determine the evolution of cooperation in mobile structured populations. PLoS ONE 18(8): e0289366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289366
