Co-Evolution of Norms and Cooperation

Abstract

"Cooperation is profitable from an evolutionary point of view as long as individuals have the right combination of cognitive and emotional faculties that enable them to extract the beliefs and values that are hidden on the behavior of other individuals. The ability of imitating intentions and not only actions has informational and regulatory reasons in social life that can generate cooperative equilibriums. Using simulation models it is possible to study how the process of institutional evolution affects the evolution of cooperation in a group of agents involved in a social dilemma situation. ADICO grammar proposed by Elinor Ostrom (2005) allows us to accurately classify and study the process of institutional evolution between different types of institutional statements. In this paper we use a cellular automata as an idealized version of a complex adaptive system and discuss how a shared strategy (AIC) can evolve to become a norm (ADIC) and what is the impact of this process on the evolution of cooperation in the system. It can be shown that this process of institutional evolution can promote a great diversity of norms from a single shared strategy. It is observed that the process of co-evolution of norms and cooperation produces better outcomes for populations of individuals who develop internal and external delta values compared to cases where no institutional evolution is achieved."