The evolutionary advantage of guilt: co-evolution of social and non-social guilt in structured populations

Abstract

Building ethical machines may involve bestowing upon them the emotional capacity to self-evaluate and repent on their actions. While apologies represent potential strategic interactions, the explicit evolution of guilt as a behavioural trait remains poorly understood. Our study delves into the co-evolution of two forms of emotional guilt: social guilt entails a cost, requiring agents to exert efforts to understand others' internal states and behaviours; and non-social guilt, which only involves awareness of one's own state, incurs no social cost. Resorting to methods from evolutionary game theory, we study analytically, and through extensive numerical and agent-based simulations, whether and how guilt can evolve and deploy, depending on the underlying structure of the systems of agents. Our findings reveal that in lattice and scale-free networks, strategies favouring emotional guilt dominate a broader range of guilt and social costs compared to non-structured well-mixed populations, so leading to higher levels of cooperation. In structured populations, both social and non-social guilt can thrive through clustering with emotionally inclined strategies, thereby providing protection against exploiters, particularly for less costly non-social strategies. These insights shed light on the complex interplay of guilt and cooperation, enhancing our understanding of ethical artificial intelligence.