Evolution of cooperation in a conformity-driven evolving dynamic social network

Network science provides a powerful methodology to study the evolutionary dynamics in the structured population, however, its current formulation of time-invariant structure does not account for the coevolutionary issue that mainly focuses on structure adaptation in response to the change in the state of nodes. Here we investigate the propagation of cooperation in a conformity-driven dynamic social network where an agent adjusts a social tie sometimes in accordance with a rival’s strategy popularity. To this end, redirecting a link mostly depends on the local popularity of the strategy rather than the strategy itself, constituting the most significant difference from the previous work. The results show that conformity-driven linking dynamics can not only directly cut off the channel by which defection always takes a free ride, yet also dramatically foster the formation as well as the stabilization of the pure strategy group whose members are carrying the same strategy. In this regard, the coevolutionary dynamics often enhances the reciprocity between cooperation and concurrently aggravates the inhibition between defection, whereby the social dilemma can be remarkably alleviated. Our observations will enrich research efforts aimed at exploring cooperation dynamics by means of strategy-neutral linking dynamics and relax the conditions for dynamic networks to uphold cooperation.