Emotion, trustworthiness and altruistic punishment in a tragedy of the commons social dilemma

Abstract

Social dilemmas require individuals to tradeoff self interests against group interests. Considerable research effort has attempted to identify conditions that promote cooperation in these social dilemmas. It has previously been shown altruistic punishment can help promote cooperation but the mechanisms that make it work are not well under- stood. We have designed a multi-agent system to investigate altruistic punishment in tragedy of the commons social dilemmas. Players develop emotional responses as they interact with others. A zero order Seguno fuzzy system is used to model the player emotional responses. Players change strategies when their emotional level exceeds a personal emotional threshold. Trustworthiness of how other players will act in the future helps choose the new strategy. Our results show how strategies evolve in a finite population match predictions made using discrete replicator equations.