Evolutionary Game Theory - Strategic Alternatives in Social Behaviour

Strategic Alternatives in Social Behaviour

Games like Hawk Dove and War of Attrition represent pure competition between individuals and have no attendant social element to the game. Where social influences apply there are four possible alternatives for strategic interaction that exist for the competitors. This is shown on the adjacent figure, where a plus sign represents a benefit and a minus sign represents a cost.

• In a Cooperative or Mutualistic relationship both “donor” and “recipient” are almost indistinguishable as both gain a benefit in the game by co-operating, i.e. the pair are in a game-wise situation where both can gain by executing a certain strategy, or alternatively both must act in concert because of some encompassing constraints that effectively puts them “ in the same boat together”.
• In an Altruistic relationship the donor, at a cost to himself provides a benefit to the recipient. In the general case the recipient will have a kin relationship to the donor and the donation is one-way. Behaviours where benefits are donated alternatively (in both directions) at a cost, are often called altruistic, but on analysis such “altruism” can be seen to arise from optimised “selfish” strategies
• Spite is essentially a “reversed” form of altruism where an ally is aided by damaging the ally’s competitor(s). The general case is that the ally is kin related and the benefit is an easier competitive environment for the ally.
• Selfishness is the base criteria of all strategic choice from a game theory perspective – strategies not aimed at self-survival and self-replication are not long for any game. Critically however, this situation is impacted by the fact that competition is taking place of multiple levels - i.e.at a genetic, an individual and a group level.

The rationale and the mathematics that lie behind adopting one of these alternative social strategies will be covered in the following sections of this article.