Prosociality by Coupling, Not Mere Observation: Homeostatic Sharing in an Inspectable Recurrent Artificial Life Agent
For artificial life researchers, this provides a minimal mechanistic explanation for how prosociality can arise from self-regulation alone, without requiring explicit social objectives.
The paper demonstrates that prosocial behavior emerges in an artificial agent when another agent's need is coupled into its own homeostatic self-regulation, even without explicit social rewards. In two toy worlds, coupling increased help rates from 0 to 1 and improved partner recovery, while mere observation or self-only conditions never produced helping.
Artificial agents can be made to "help" for many reasons, including explicit social reward, hard-coded prosocial bonuses, or direct access to another agent's internal state. Those possibilities make minimal prosocial behavior hard to interpret. Building on ReCoN-Ipsundrum, an inspectable recurrent controller with affect-coupled regulation, I add an explicit homeostat and a social coupling channel while keeping planning strictly self-directed: the agent scores only its own predicted internal state, and no partner-welfare reward term is introduced. I compare four matched conditions in two toy worlds. In a one-step FoodShareToy, an exact solver finds a sharp switch from EAT to PASS at $λ* \approx 0.91$ for the default state. In the experimental runs, the self-only and partner-observing conditions never help, whereas the affectively coupled conditions always do. In a multi-step SocialCorridorWorld, the same dissociation reappears: coupling flips help rate and partner recovery from 0 to 1 and cuts rescue latency from 18 to 9 steps, while raising mutual viability from 0.15 to 0.33. Sham lesions preserve helping, but coupling-off and shuffled-partner lesions abolish it in both tasks. A coupling sweep shows a load-dependent feasibility boundary: under low load, helping appears for $λ \geq 0.25$, whereas under medium and high loads no tested value rescues the partner within horizon. The result is a narrow claim for artificial life: in this minimal architecture, helping appears when another's need is routed into self-regulation.