Researches On Evolutionary Mechanism Of Ethnic Harmony Based On Evolutionary Game Simulation

The force of the ethnic separatists damages national stability and harmony ofethnic groups. This force essentially origins from extreme ethnic identity. In order toeliminate the foundation of the ethnic separatism and set up a more harmoniousethnic relation, some scholars have proposed that national harmony could bepromoted by strengthening citizen identity. However, this assertion is discussed onlyfrom a philosophical viewpoint and is still lack of supports of scientific evidences.Furthermore, the assertion has four detail questions to answer:1) whether civicidentity promotes national harmony, i.e., whether the degree of civic identity andethnic harmony has a positive correlation;2) whether nationalism will die out by thecoercive power once and for all;3) what consequences will be brought by enhancenational identity or citizen identity;4) what means should be taken to maintain ahigh degree of ethnic harmony. These problems can not be answered by sociologicalresearches and the responding research methods. The current paper insists that nationis a product of evolution, and use the natural science research methods which isbased on evolutionary game theory and combined with computer simulationtechnology to test this philosophy assertion and answer the four questions.The detailed work is as follows:1. According to the concepts of evolution game theory, this paper maps theconcepts of nationality to the evolutionary game theory. Nations map to groups;national conflicts map to group conflicts; national identity maps to parochialismstrategy (abbreviated as P); citizen identity maps to tolerance strategy (T);altruistic behaviors map to altruism strategy (A); selfish behaviors map toNon-Altruism strategy(N). From the national level, nations have gamerelationships, i.e., a group may have hostile or friendly attitude to other groups.From the Individual level, individuals have game relationships, i.e., altruists willshare their own resources within group (though such a behavior will damagealtruists’ benefit), while non-altruists will never share resources. Each individualwill two strategies between-group and inter-group respectively. Thus, there arefour types of game strategies, parochial altruist strategy (PA), parochialnon-altruist strategy (PN), tolerant altruist strategy (TA) and tolerantnon-altruists strategy (TN). PA individuals are hostile toward other groups but toshare resources within group members, while PN do not share resources.Individuals with T are friendly toward other groups. TA individuals are friendlytoward other groups and like to share resources within group members, while TNindividuals do not share resources. The evolution simulation is realized bygenetic algorithm. PA individuals are hostile toward other groups but to shareresources within group members by sacrificing their own benefit, thus only PAindividuals will attend the conflicts. Furthermore, the more the PA individuals,the higher opportunity a conflict occurs.2. During the simulation experiments, this paper simulates national hostile orfriendly relationships by20groups, and each group has26individuals tosimulate the within-group game relationship. Between-group game rules are as follows. If a conflict occurs, a fraction of the PA individuals in both groups die,and a fraction of the surviving PA and non-PA individuals of the losing group arealso eliminated. If the outcome is a draw in which PA individuals die as above,but non-PA individuals do not. If there is no conflict, then compute theresponding payoffs. Within-group game rules are as follows. Every generation,all members of each group are paired randomly with members of their group toproduce offspring, whose expected number is proportional to the parentalcouple’s share of the group’s payoffs. With some probability, each member’soffspring mutates to be one of the four types randomly, which is independent ofthe parental types. Each generation, with some probability, each membermigrates to a randomly selected group.3. The simulation results show that1) the rate of national identity individuals has apositive correlation with ethnic conflicts, and vice verse for citizen identity;2)nationalism will not die out by clean national identity individuals once and for all,and the proportion of national identity individuals will bounce back to theoriginal level;3) ethnic conflicts will reduce in the short term by increasing therate of citizen identity individuals, but the rate of national identity individualsand ethnic conflicts will rebound quickly after the disappearance of pressure, andethnic conflicts will ascend by increasing the rate of ethnic identity individuals;4)the average conflict frequencies can stay in a low level by increasing theproportion of civic identity individuals periodically.