Conformity enhances network reciprocity in evolutionary social dilemmas

The pursuit of highest payoffs in evolutionary social dilemmas is risky and sometimes inferior to conformity. Choosing the most common strategy within the interaction range is safer because it ensures that the payoff of an individual will not be much lower than average. Herding instincts and crowd behaviour in humans and social animals also compel to conformity in their own right. Motivated by these facts, we here study the impact of conformity on the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas. We show that an appropriate fraction of conformists within the population introduces an effective surface tension around cooperative clusters and ensures smooth interfaces between different strategy domains. Payoff-driven players brake the symmetry in favour of cooperation and enable an expansion of clusters past the boundaries imposed by traditional network reciprocity. This mechanism works even under the most testing conditions, and it is robust against variations of the interaction network as long as degree-normalized payoffs are applied. Conformity may thus be beneficial for the resolution of social dilemmas.