Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Jun 18;110(25):10229-33. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1308221110. Epub 2013 Jun 3.
Although cooperation and trust are essential features for the development of prosperous populations, they also put cooperating individuals at risk for exploitation and abuse. Empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that the solution to the problem resides in the practice of mimicry and imitation, the expectation of opponent's mimicry and the reliance on similarity indices. Here we fuse the principles of enacted and expected mimicry and condition their application on two similarity indices to produce a model of mimicry and relative similarity. Testing the model in computer simulations of behavioral niches, populated with agents that enact various strategies and learning algorithms, shows how mimicry and relative similarity outperforms all the opponent strategies it was tested against, pushes noncooperative opponents toward extinction, and promotes the development of cooperative populations. The proposed model sheds light on the evolution of cooperation and provides a blueprint for intentional induction of cooperation within and among populations. It is suggested that reducing conflict intensities among human populations necessitates (i) instigation of social initiatives that increase the perception of similarity among opponents and (ii) efficient lowering of the similarity threshold of the interaction, the minimal level of similarity that makes cooperation advisable.
尽管合作和信任是繁荣人口发展的必要特征，但它们也使合作个体面临被剥削和滥用的风险。经验和理论证据表明，解决这个问题的办法在于模仿和模仿的实践，即对对手模仿的期望和对相似性指数的依赖。在这里，我们融合了表现和预期模仿的原则，并根据两个相似性指数来调整它们的应用，以产生模仿和相对相似性的模型。在行为生态位的计算机模拟中测试该模型，其中有各种策略和学习算法的代理，表明模仿和相对相似性如何胜过所有与之相比的对手策略，将非合作的对手推向灭绝，并促进合作人口的发展。所提出的模型阐明了合作的进化，并为在群体内部和群体之间有意诱导合作提供了蓝图。有人认为，减少人类群体之间的冲突强度需要：（i）发起增加对手之间相似性感知的社会倡议；（ii）有效地降低互动的相似性阈值，即使合作变得明智的最低相似性水平。
