Culture and cooperation in a spatial public goods game

We study the coevolution of culture and cooperation by combining the Axelrod model of cultural dissemination with a spatial public goods game, incorporating both noise and social influence. Both participation and cooperation in public goods games are conditional on cultural similarity. We find that a larger "scope of cultural possibilities" in the model leads to the survival of cooperation, when noise is not present, and a higher probability of a multicultural state evolving, for low noise rates. High noise rates, however, lead to both rapid extinction of cooperation and collapse into cultural "anomie," in which stable cultural regions fail to form. These results suggest that cultural diversity can actually be beneficial for the evolution of cooperation, but that cultural information needs to be transmitted accurately in order to maintain both coherent cultural groups and cooperation.