Social Aggregation as a Cooperative Game

A new model for the description of phenomena of social aggregation is presented. On the basis of psychological concepts (social norms, cultural coordinates, and so on), we conceive a cellular automaton in which different clusters of individuals can merge according to the cooperation among the agents. In their turn, the agents can cooperate or defect according to the clusters distribution inside the system. In general, the fitness of an individual increases with the size of its cluster, but decreases with the work the individual had to do in order to join it. We see how the cooperation is the most convenient strategy only in presence of very large clusters, while on the other hand it is not necessary to have one hundred percent of cooperators for reaching a totally ordered configuration with only one megacluster filling the whole system. PACS: 89.65.-s, 02.50.Le, 89.20.-a, 89.75.-k Social Aggregation as a Cooperative Game 2