I am currently finishing a PhD in network physics and have been thinking about this exact topic for a while. It seems reasonable to me that the way we handle inter-individual cooperation is cognitively limited in some way by the Dunbar number. Moreover, some other topological constraints could also occur. In their 1998 milestone paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/30918), Watts and Strogatz basically explained that in a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma, the higher the number of shortcuts, the less likely the emergence of cooperation. These shortcuts are ... (read more)
I am currently finishing a PhD in network physics and have been thinking about this exact topic for a while. It seems reasonable to me that the way we handle inter-individual cooperation is cognitively limited in some way by the Dunbar number. Moreover, some other topological constraints could also occur. In their 1998 milestone paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/30918), Watts and Strogatz basically explained that in a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma, the higher the number of shortcuts, the less likely the emergence of cooperation. These shortcuts are ... (read more)