Collision of social norms: Emergence of cooperation through the timescales

Social norms are significant in studying social dilemmas, as diverse norms can trigger complex behavior patterns and have a profound impact on the evolution of cooperation. However, adjusting individual strategies imposes a time lag that unclearly impacts decision-making in multi-strategy cases. Hence, this work extends the multi-strategy co-evolutionary model by introducing time scales for strategy adjustment. The results demonstrate that rapid strategy adjustment promotes the proliferation of conformity strategies, and as the time interval between strategy adjustments increases, this induces the predominance of benefit-oriented rational strategies. Additionally, the spatial patterns of different strategies contribute to cooperative evolution. Our findings assist in revealing the reasons for the coexistence of multiple social norms from the perspective of time scales.