Asymmetric interaction preference induces cooperation in human-agent hybrid game

With the development of artificial intelligence, human beings are increasingly interested in human-agent collaboration, which generates a series of problems about the relationship between agents and humans, such as trust and cooperation. This inevitably induces the inherent human characteristic that there are subjective interaction preferences for different groups, especially in human-agent hybrid systems where human-human interaction, agent-agent interaction, and human-agent interaction coexist. However, understanding how individual interaction preferences affect the cooperation of the system remains a major challenge. Therefore, this paper proposes a human-agent hybrid prisoner's dilemma game system under the framework of evolutionary game. In spatial networks, the most significant difference between agents and humans is the flexibility of decision, where humans have higher adaptive capabilities, follow link dynamics, and adopt free decision rules, which enable them to choose different strategies for different neighbors. However, agents follow node dynamics and adopt consistent decision rules, applying the same strategy to different neighbors. We give the subjective preferences of any individual to different groups, involving the interaction preferences between homogeneous groups and heterogeneous groups respectively. The simulation results show that both human and agent have asymmetric interaction preferences for groups with different identities, which can significantly improve the cooperative behavior of the system. In the hybrid system, human groups show more stable prosocial behavior. Agent groups can form highly cooperative clusters under the condition of strong interaction preference for human groups. In addition, giving agents the ability to identify opponents can effectively alleviate the interaction dilemma of agents.