The evolution and social cost of herding mentality promote cooperation

Manuel Chica; William Rand; Francisco C Santos

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.107927

The evolution and social cost of herding mentality promote cooperation

iScience. 2023 Sep 15;26(10):107927. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107927. eCollection 2023 Oct 20.

Authors

Manuel Chica^{1

2}, William Rand³, Francisco C Santos⁴

Affiliations

¹ Andalusian Research Institute DaSCI "Data Science and Computational Intelligence", University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain.
² School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia.
³ Poole College of Management, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA.
⁴ INESC-ID & Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2744-016 Porto Salvo, Portugal.

Abstract

Herding behavior has a social cost for individuals not following the herd, influencing human decision-making. This work proposes including a social cost derived from herding mentality into the payoffs of pairwise game interactions. We introduce a co-evolutionary asymmetric model with four individual strategies (cooperation vs. defection and herding vs. non-herding) to understand the co-emergence of herding behavior and cooperation. Computational experiments show how including herding costs promotes cooperation by increasing the parameter space under which cooperation persists. Results demonstrate a synergistic relationship between the emergence of cooperation and herding mentality: the highest cooperation is achieved when the herding mentality also achieves its highest level. Finally, we study different herding social costs and its relationship to cooperation and herding evolution. This study points to new social mechanisms, related to conformity-driven imitation behavior, that help to understand how and why cooperation prevails in human groups.

Keywords: Psychological evolution; Psychology; Sociology.