Evolutionary advantage of guilt: Co-evolution of social and non-social guilt in structured populations

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 ..., Computational simulation of evolutionary game theory interactions on networks, ran using Agents.jl in Julia. Equilibria analysis and replicator dynamics solving done using a mix of Julia and Python. Processed using various Julia data and analysis facilities (DataFrames.jl, PlotlyJS.jl, Makie.jl)., , # Evolutionary advantage of guilt: Co-evolution of social and non-social guilt in structured populations

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.44j0zpcr5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.44j0zpcr5)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data generated for the \"The Evolutionary Advantage of Guilt: Insights from Networked Multi-Agent Systems\" paper authored by Theodor Cimpeanu, Luis Moniz Pereira and The Anh Han.

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 f...,