The Network Structure – Altruism
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/cooperation-networks/538842/?utm_source=nl-atlantic-daily-090617&silverid=%%RECIPIENT_ID%%
Humans by nature show a level of altruism that creates an evolutionary puzzle. Why do individuals help others at the expense of themselves? In an evolutionary sense, why help others at the expense of not passing on genetics? The article investigations this question by creating a network to model systems of cooperation and conflict.
Each member of a community can be modeled as a node in a network where there are strong and weak ties between neighbors represent exactly that. Based on the ties that each person has, cooperation or conflict will ensue. As time passes, the community will flow to either full cooperation or conflict. This is a result of the prisoner’s dilemma in Game Theory. Based on whether cooperation or conflict provides a better payoff dictates how neighbors will cooperate with each other.
The researchers understood that for a node to completely cooperate then the cost benefit ratio must be greater than the number of strong ties to neighbors. This idea makes a lot of sense however some nodes in the same network have more connections than others, thus it leads to a dilemma. In order to know whether a network would lead to cooperation, the critical cost benefit ratio must be analyzed. This indicates how many strong neighbor ties a node can have. Thus, the result of this research showed that for most networks, cooperation will thrive if each node has strong ties to a small number of neighbors. The opposite can be said for networks with a cost benefit ratio lower than the number of strong ties. However, if the critical cost benefit ratio is negative, then regardless, conflict will always ensue.