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Counterfactual Thinking in Cooperation Dynamics

Counterfactual Thinking (CT) is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. CT captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred; or, otherwise, to reason about an event that did occur but what would ensue had it not; or if another might have happened in its stead. Given the wide cognitive empowerment of CT in the human individual, the question arises of how the presence of individuals with CT-enabled improved strate- gies affects the evolution of cooperation in a population comprising individuals with diverse strategies. Here we propose a mathematical model, grounded on Evolutionary Game Theory, to examine the population dynamics emerging from the interplay between CT and Social Learning (SL) when individuals face cooperation dilemmas. Our results suggest that CT fosters coordination in collective action problems and has a limited impact in cooperation dilemmas where coordination is not required. Moreover, we show that, in coordina- tion dilemmas, a small prevalence of individuals resorting to CT is enough to nudge an entire population towards highly cooperative standards.