Acculturation and the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games

Cooperation is one of the foundations of human society. Many solutions to cooperation problems have been developed and culturally transmitted across generations. Since immigration can play a role in nourishing or disrupting cooperation in societies, we must understand how the newcomers’ culture interacts with the hosting culture. Here, we investigate the effect of different acculturation settings on the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games with the immigration of defectors and efficient cooperators. Here, immigrants may be socially influenced, or not, by the native culture according to four acculturation settings: integration, where immigrants imitate both immigrants and natives; marginalization, where immigrants do not imitate either natives nor other immigrants; assimilation, where immigrants only imitate natives; and separation, where immigrants only imitate other immigrants. We found that cooperation is greatly facilitated and reaches a peak for moderate values of the migration rate under any acculturation setting. Most interestingly, we found that the main acculturation factor driving the highest levels of cooperation is that immigrants do not avoid social influence from their fellow immigrants. We also show that integration may not promote the highest level of native cooperation if the benefit of cooperation is low. Graphic abstract