The Evolution of Cooperation

Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. D. (1981). The Evolution of Cooperation. Science, 211(4489), 1390-1396.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1981

Volume

211

Issue

4489

Pages

1390-1396

DOI

10.1126/science.7466396

DOI registrant

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Link

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7466396

Cited from

economics_finance, information_theory, sociology_anthropology

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Informal Enforcement
  • Evolutionary biology: Cooperation stabilized by reciprocal punishment, partner-switching, and the withdrawal of future cooperation among individuals with no central enforcer — the population-level account of how altruistic restraint persists despite the temptation to defect.

    This sourceGame-theoretic foundation showing how reciprocity (tit-for-tat) stabilizes cooperation among self-interested agents with no central enforcer; supports the evolutionary-biology claim about cooperation sustained by reciprocal reaction.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The abstract establishes reciprocity-based cooperation that starts, thrives and resists invasion in an asocial world, but names no reciprocal punishment or partner-switching mechanism.

    “a model is developed based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Deductions from the model, and the results of a computer tournament show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Non-Zero-Sum Game
  • In biology and ecology, mutualism, reciprocal altruism, and cooperative breeding are non-zero-sum; predator-prey at a single interaction is zero-sum but at the population level shifts into non-zero-sum coevolution.

    This sourceShows how reciprocal cooperation can be individually rational and evolutionarily stable in non-zero-sum interactions, including biological mutualism and reciprocal altruism.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    Abstract supports reciprocity-based cooperation as evolutionarily stable non-zero-sum Prisoner's Dilemma play; silent on mutualism, cooperative breeding, and predator-prey coevolution.

    “Deductions from the model, and the results of a computer tournament show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Social Dilemma
  • A practitioner who has internalized the dilemma in one substrate carries a working toolkit — repeat, enforce, reprice, commit — into every other substrate that presents the same matrix, which is the practical payoff of treating the social dilemma as a substrate-independent structure rather than a story about prisoners.

    This sourceGame-theoretic foundation showing how reciprocity (tit-for-tat) stabilizes cooperation among self-interested agents with no central enforcer; supports the evolutionary-biology claim about cooperation sustained by reciprocal reaction.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The abstract shows reciprocity (tit-for-tat) can start, sustain and defend cooperation in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it says nothing about carrying a toolkit into other substrates.

    “Deductions from the model, and the results of a computer tournament show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 3 of 3 citations: 3 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:b191eff42072 · see in the full table