Cooperation with both synergistic and local interactions can be worse than each alone

Cooperation is ubiquitous ranging from multicellular organisms to human societies. Population structures indicating individuals' limited interaction ranges are crucial to understand this issue. But it remains unknown to what extend multiple interactions involving nonlinearity in payoff influence the cooperation in structured populations. Here we show a rule, which determines the emergence and stabilization of cooperation, under multiple discounted, linear, and synergistic interactions. The rule is validated by simulations in homogenous and heterogenous structured populations. We find that the more neighbours there are the harder for cooperation to evolve for multiple interactions with linearity and discounting. For synergistic scenario, however, distinct from its pairwise counterpart, moderate number of neighbours can be the worst, indicating that synergistic interactions work with strangers but not with neighbours. Our results suggest that the combination of different factors which promotes cooperation alone can be worse than that with every single factor.