The prerequisite for emotion-driven cooperation: The composition and transmissibility of social value orientations

Liang Zhang and Jianwei Wang

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2026, vol. 202, issue P1

Abstract: Whether emotions promote or inhibit cooperation in social dilemmas remains a contentious issue. The key to resolving this debate lies in considering social value orientations, which determine how emotions primarily arise from social interactions. Here, we construct an evolutionary game-theoretic framework where emotions are modeled as dynamic variables influencing individuals’ available investments in public goods games. Within this framework, we investigate how the composition and transmissibility of social value orientations affect the evolution of cooperation. The results demonstrate that emotion-driven investment can significantly enhance both cooperation levels and social welfare, provided that the proportion of prosocial-oriented players exceeds a certain threshold. Otherwise, emotion-driven investment tends to have an inhibitory effect. Furthermore, we find that when social value orientations can co-transmit alongside strategy updates, cooperation and social welfare are further improved across a considerable range of transmission rates. The underlying mechanism is that prosocial orientation is more self-consistent and sustainable than individualistic orientation, and the transmissibility of social value orientations facilitates the emergence of prosocial clusters, which achieve a virtuous cycle among cooperation, emotion, and social welfare. This study reveals that the composition of social value orientations plays a decisive role in shaping emotion’s impact on cooperation evolution, while their transmissibility provides endogenous momentum for populations to self-organize toward pathways of enriched cooperation.

Keywords: Public goods game; Emotion; Cooperation evolution; Social value orientation; Evolutionary game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:202:y:2026:i:p1:s0960077925014912

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2025.117478

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