Evolutionary Dynamics of Social Behaviours on Multilayer Networks

Abstract

Nature shows as human beings live and grow inside social structures. This assumption allows explaining and exploring how it may shape most of our behaviours and choices, and why we are not just blindly driven by instincts: our decisions are based on more complex cognitive reasons, based on our connectedness on di erent spaces. Thus, human cooperation emerges from this complex nature of social network. One of the main aims of my Ph.D. dissertation is to explore how and why it happens, hence the work is mainly focused on studying the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and social behaviours on a multilayer social network. Following a Bio-inspired approach, the social network analysis methodologies, and exploiting the mathematical framework of Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), the target is to unveil the hidden dynamics, observe non-trivial patterns, nding out the hidden emergent behaviours in a population. The study of cooperation and its evolutionary dynamics on a social network, has raised up the need of a model able to explain the actual complexity of real-world networks, where individuals are connected through multiple types of relationships. For this reason, the mathematical framework of multilayer networks has been exploited, indeed it allows us to encompass these several interactions and relationships, exploring and unveiling how the di erent ties in the various layers can impact on the emergence of social behaviours in a population. Therefore, the presence of the same nodes in multiple layers of a system, known as multiplexity, is the key to understand emergent phenomena, adding an extra dimension of analysis which explains what is the role not only of the intralayer interactions, as in a single-layer framework, but also of interlayer interactions for the emergence of these phenomena. Furthermore, it is explored and quanti ed the role of some shaping factors, such as homophily, in this evolutionary process. Taking into account all these aspects, a novel analytical model is proposed, together with a simulative investigation of the evolution of human cooperation using mutliplex evolutionary game theory, shedding light on the key role played by homophily and multiplexity in the evolution of cooperation. (continue in Ph. D. dissertation)