Evolution of Cooperation in Snowdrift Game with Multi-Memory Mechanism

Cooperative behavior has been of great concern in evolutionary game researches because of its important role in social life and natural evolution. Since memory can greatly influence the emergence of cooperative behavior, memory-based research on evolutionary games has proliferated in recent years. In the present paper, inspired by the well-known “Stanford marshmallow experiment” (SME), we proposed a multi-memory mechanism in Snowdrift game (SDG) on spatial lattice networks whose core lies in what follows: Players are divided into two groups according to individual self-control; different memory lengths are set by group and by time in a single realization. The simulation results show that our proposed mechanism promotes cooperation level of the considered evolutionary game. More specifically, as memory length increases to an intermediate length, the cooperation level increases as well. For mechanism with short memory length, the effect of population structure is obvious and small values of adjusting factor can intensively facilitate high-frequency cooperative behavior. These findings may be helpful to understand the connection between population heterogeneity and the emergence of high cooperation.