Title: Knowing the past improves cooperation in the future,
Abstract: Cooperation is the cornerstone of human evolutionary success. Like no other
species, we champion the sacrifice of personal benefits for the common good,
and we work together to achieve what we are unable to achieve alone. Knowledge
and information from past generations is thereby often instrumental in ensuring
we keep cooperating rather than deteriorating to less productive ways of
coexistence. Here we present a mathematical model based on evolutionary game
theory that shows how using the past as the benchmark for evolutionary success,
rather than just current performance, significantly improves cooperation in the
future. Interestingly, the details of just how the past is taken into account
play only second-order importance, whether it be a weighted average of past
payoffs or just a single payoff value from the past. Cooperation is promoted
because information from the past disables fast invasions of defectors, thus
enhancing the long-term benefits of cooperative behavior.