Fostering co-operative behaviour through social intervention

The emergence and maintenance of co-operation in a society of agents is an important issue and some recent research has explored the role that can be played by a functional model of emotions. For example, it has been shown that the emotions of gratitude and anger can be used to produce co-operative behaviour in a public goods game from agents acting solely in accordance with their current emotional state. The effectiveness of these emotions in producing co-operation depends on the emotional volatility of the agents, which determines the strength of these emotions required to alter behaviour. Often, however, dysfunctional relationships develop, which impairs the performance of the society as a whole. In this paper we explore through a series of computational simulations how interventions by society can be used to correct dysfunctional behaviour. The results of our simulations show that enforcement of co-operative behaviour and education to alter emotional characters can improve overall performance in the dysfunctional cases and that different interventions are appropriate given different initial circumstances.