Gower-Winter, Brandon and Nitschke, Geoff (2022) Do Harsher Environments cause Selfish or Altruistic Behavior, Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2022), 9-13 July 2022, Boston, USA.
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Abstract
In this study we develop an Agent-based Model (ABM), called Neo- COOP, to investigate the emergence and evolution of altruistic and selfish behaviour in Neolithic-inspired household agents under varying degrees of environmental stress. We conduct scenario experimentation where we track the evolution of the agents’ resource trading preferences in scenarios with varying frequencies of environmental stress and agent types initialized to exhibit differing altruistic or selfish tendencies. Our results suggest that neither extreme selfishness or extreme altruism is desirable but rather, some middle-ground value is. Additionally, we find that the frequency of the environmental stress plays a significant role in the emergence of selfish behaviour amongst the social elite with higher frequency environmental stress scenarios resulting in a greater disparity of resource transfer beliefs between agents with equal social status.
| Item Type: | Conference paper |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence Computing methodologies > Machine learning Computing methodologies > Modeling and simulation |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Sep 2022 07:55 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Sep 2022 07:55 |
| URI: | https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1544 |
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