Edinburgh Napier University

  Environmental risk is an important factor that influences social evolution in natural and artificial environments. Here we analyse environmental risk and we define objective, subjective and effective environmental risk, which are important aspects of general environmental risk. We show theoretically and by analysing simulation data that subjective risk is larger than objective risk and that effective risk is smaller than subjective risk, when cooperation is present. We believe that the proposed conceptualisation of environmental risk can help in understanding its effects on social evolution and also in designing of artificial social environments.