Dynamics of Moral Behavior in Heterogeneous Populations of Learning Agents

In this paper, we present a study of the learning dynamics of morally heterogeneous populations interacting in a social dilemma setting.

Using a Prisoner’s Dilemma environment with a partner selection mechanism, we investigate the extent to which the prevalence of diverse moral agents in populations affects individual agents’ learning behaviors and emergent population-level outcomes.

We observe several types of non-trivial interactions between pro-social and anti-social agents, and find that certain classes of moral agents are able to steer selfish agents towards more cooperative behavior.