Cultural evolution to promote cooperation in social dilemmas

Social dilemmas are characterised by a choice between actions which are individually rational but collectively sub-optimal and actions which are better for the collective but leave individuals open to exploitation. Evolutionary game theory has been adopted to model the evolution of successive generations of agents playing a social dilemma game. In evolutionary simulations of N-player social dilemmas, cooperation rarely emerges. This paper investigates cultural evolution (via norms that are recorded as artifacts) as a means to increase the fitness of the society by allowing individual strategies to base their actions, not just on their genetic material, but to also take into consideration (by learning) evidence recorded as artifacts. We show that allowing cultural evolution for a set of strategies in a small population can result in a stable and cooperative society.