Prejudice-driven spite: A discontinuous phase transition in the ultimatum game.

Abstract

In a mix of prejudiced and unprejudiced individuals engaged in strategic interactions, the individual intensity of prejudice is expected to influence the overall level of societal prejudice. A high level of prejudice should lead to discrimination that may manifest as unfairness and, perhaps, even spite. In this paper, we investigate this idea in the classical paradigm of the ultimatum game, which we theoretically modify to introduce prejudice at the level of players, terming its intensity as prejudicity. The stochastic evolutionary game dynamics, in the regime of replication-selection, reveals the emergence of spiteful behavior as a dominant behavior via a first-order phase transition-a discontinuous jump in the frequency of spiteful individuals at a threshold value of prejudicity. The phase transition is quite robust and becomes progressively conspicuous in the limit of large population size, where deterministic evolutionary game dynamics, viz., replicator dynamics, approximates the system closely. The emergence of spite driven by prejudice is also found to persist when one considers long-term evolutionary dynamics in the mutation-selection dominated regime.