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Global network cooperation catalysed by a small prosocial migrant clique

Much research has been carried out to understand the emergence of cooperation in simulated social networks of competing individuals. Such research typically implements a population as a single connected network. Here we adopt a more realistic premise; namely that populations consist of multiple networks, whose members migrate from one to another. Specifically, we isolate the key elements of the scenario where a minority of members from a cooperative network migrate to a network populated by defectors. Using the public goods game to model group-wise cooperation, we find that under certain circumstances, the concerted actions of a trivial number of such migrants will catalyse widespread behavioural change throughout an entire population. Such results support a wider argument: that the general presence of some form of disruption contributes to the emergence of cooperation in social networks, and consequently that simpler models may encode a determinism that precludes the emergence of cooperation.