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Small groups and long memories promote cooperation

Overview of attention for article published in Scientific Reports, June 2016
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About this Attention Score

  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (97th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (96th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
7 news outlets
blogs
2 blogs
twitter
54 X users
facebook
2 Facebook pages

Citations

dimensions_citation
69 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
92 Mendeley
citeulike
2 CiteULike
Title
Small groups and long memories promote cooperation
Published in
Scientific Reports, June 2016
DOI 10.1038/srep26889
Pubmed ID
Authors

Alexander J. Stewart, Joshua B. Plotkin

Abstract

Complex social behaviors lie at the heart of many of the challenges facing evolutionary biology, sociology, economics, and beyond. For evolutionary biologists the question is often how group behaviors such as collective action, or decision making that accounts for memories of past experience, can emerge and persist in an evolving system. Evolutionary game theory provides a framework for formalizing these questions and admitting them to rigorous study. Here we develop such a framework to study the evolution of sustained collective action in multi-player public-goods games, in which players have arbitrarily long memories of prior rounds of play and can react to their experience in an arbitrary way. We construct a coordinate system for memory-m strategies in iterated n-player games that permits us to characterize all cooperative strategies that resist invasion by any mutant strategy, and stabilize cooperative behavior. We show that, especially when groups are small, longer-memory strategies make cooperation easier to evolve, by increasing the number of ways to stabilize cooperation. We also explore the co-evolution of behavior and memory. We find that even when memory has a cost, longer-memory strategies often evolve, which in turn drives the evolution of cooperation, even when the benefits for cooperation are low.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 54 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 92 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 2 2%
United Kingdom 2 2%
Portugal 1 1%
Brazil 1 1%
Japan 1 1%
Luxembourg 1 1%
Unknown 84 91%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 24 26%
Researcher 14 15%
Other 7 8%
Student > Master 7 8%
Student > Bachelor 6 7%
Other 16 17%
Unknown 18 20%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 16 17%
Psychology 11 12%
Computer Science 10 11%
Social Sciences 8 9%
Engineering 4 4%
Other 17 18%
Unknown 26 28%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 96. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 10 February 2017.
All research outputs
#434,245
of 25,253,876 outputs
Outputs from Scientific Reports
#4,817
of 138,955 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#8,538
of 346,853 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Scientific Reports
#135
of 3,565 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,253,876 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 98th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 138,955 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.7. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 346,853 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 3,565 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.