Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does cooperation arise in an evolutionary context? We ap-proach this problem using a collective search paradigm whereinteractions are dynamic and there is competition for rewards.Using evolutionary simulations, we find that the unconditionalsharing of information can be an evolutionary advantageousstrategy without the need for conditional strategies or explicitreciprocation. Shared information acts as a recruitment sig-nal and facilitates the formation of a self-organized group.Thus, the improved search efficiency of the collective bestowsbyproduct benefits onto the original sharer. A key mecha-nism is a visibility radius, where individuals have uncondi-tional access to information about neighbors within a lim-ited distance. Our results show that for a variety of initialconditions—including populations initially devoid of prosocialindividuals—and across both static and dynamic fitness land-scapes, we find strong selection pressure to evolve uncondi-tional sharing.