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Inequality-induced emotions might promote cooperation in evolutionary games

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Abstract

Two types of emotions, envy and guilt, could be induced when people encounter inequality; especially, persons who are disadvantaged may feel envy toward the ones at advantage, whereas those in superior positions may feel guilty. These two emotions can affect subjective evaluations of their own utilities. In most previous studies of evolutionary games, the payoffs gained from games are directly used for payoff comparison when individuals consider to imitate others’ strategies, regardless of the impacts caused by the inner emotions. Here, we introduce two types of inequality aversion in evolutionary games and assume that the inequality aversion can induce two different emotions and subsequently affect the utilities of individuals. We investigate how the inequality aversion affects the evolution of cooperation in spatial evolutionary games. The numerical simulation results show that envy makes the evolution of cooperation more difficult, while guilt can effectively promote cooperation. Moreover, we have provided some intuitive explanations by scrutinizing the microscopic evolutions of the strategy patterns for different types of players, which are categorized according to strategy and emotion. We find that, to cooperators and defectors, the two emotions have different influences on strategy transmission in different evolution stages, respectively. Roughly speaking, envy hinders cooperation by weakening cooperators, while guilt promotes cooperation by weakening defectors. Besides, we also study the effects of inequality aversion on payoff distribution and find that envy influences fairness negatively, whereas guilt plays a positive role in fairness.

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Data availability statement

This manuscript has no associated data or the data will not be deposited. [Authors’ comment:The results are obtained mainly through numerical simulation, and all the related data have been shown in the figures of the article.]

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 11805021 and the BUPT Excellent Ph.D. Students Foundation under Grant no. CX2021226.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Science, Bei**g University of Posts and Telecommunications, Bei**g, 100876, China

    Jiawei Wang, Liming Zhang, Haihong Li, Qionglin Dai & Junzhong Yang

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  1. Jiawei Wang
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  2. Liming Zhang
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  3. Haihong Li
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  4. Qionglin Dai
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Contributions

JW and LZ: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, writing—original draft. HL: conceptualization, methodology, visualization, software. QD: writing—original draft, formal analysis, funding acquisition, validation. JY: validation, supervision.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Liming Zhang or Qionglin Dai.

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Wang, J., Zhang, L., Li, H. et al. Inequality-induced emotions might promote cooperation in evolutionary games. Eur. Phys. J. B 96, 37 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/s10051-023-00508-z

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