Extreme Environments Perpetuate Cooperation

We investigate whether environmental stress positively impacts the emergence of cooperative behaviour in socially stratified societies. We achieve this by utilizing NeoCOOP, an Agent-based Model that uses artificial evolution as adaptive mechanisms to simulate the emergence and evolution of altruistic and selfish behaviour in Neolithic-inspired agents. We perform scenario experimentation whereby we monitor the resource trading preferences of these agents by varying the frequency of environmental stress and the initial beliefs of said agents. Our results indicate that in extreme conditions, altruism is preferred. Furthermore, our results suggest that the degree of social stratification of a population is positively related to its ability to maintain logistic-like growth while remaining susceptible to environmental stress.