Full metadata
Title
Simulating Cooperative Behaviors in a Subsistence Population: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach
Description
Humans cooperate at levels unseen in other species. Identifying the adaptive mechanisms driving this unusual behavior, as well as how these mechanisms interact to create complex cooperative patterns, remains an open question in anthropology. One impediment to such investigations is that complete, long-term datasets of human cooperative behaviors in small-scale societies are hard to come by; such field research is often hindered both by humans' long lifespans and by the difficulties of collecting data in remote societies. In this study, I attempted to overcome these methodological challenges by simulating individual human cooperative behaviors in a small-scale population. Using an agent-based model tuned to population-level measurements from a real-life marine subsistence population in the southern Philippines, I generated dynamic daily cooperative behaviors in a hypothetical subsistence population over a period of 1500 years and 42 overlapping generations. Preliminary findings from the model suggest that, while the agent-based model broadly captured a number of characteristic population-level patterns in the subsistence population, it did not fully replicate nuances of the population's observed cooperative behaviors. In particular, statistical models of the simulated data identified reciprocity-based and need-based cooperative behaviors but did not detect kinship-motivated cooperation, despite the fact that kin cooperation traits evolved positively and reciprocity cooperation traits evolved negatively over time in the agent population. It is possible that this discrepancy reflects a complex interaction between kinship and reciprocity in the agent-based model. On the other hand, it may also suggest that these types of statistical models, which are frequently utilized in human cooperation studies in the anthropological literature, do not reliably discriminate between kin-based and reciprocity-based cooperation mechanisms when both exist in a population. Even so, the completeness of the simulated data enabled use of more complex statistical methodologies which were able to disentangle the relative effects of cooperative mechanisms operating at different decision levels. By addressing remaining pattern-matching issues, future iterations of the agent-based model may prove to be a useful tool for validating empirical research and investigating novel hypotheses about the evolution and maintenance of cooperative behaviors in human populations.
Date Created
2023
Contributors
- Phelps, Julia R. (Author)
- Reiser, Mark (Thesis advisor)
- Saul, Steven (Thesis advisor)
- Morgan, Thomas (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
145 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.187738
Level of coding
minimal
Cataloging Standards
Note
Partial requirement for: M.S., Arizona State University, 2023
Field of study: Statistics
System Created
- 2023-06-07 12:19:35
System Modified
- 2023-06-07 12:19:42
- 1 year 5 months ago
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