  Evolutionary games provide the theoretical backbone for many aspects of our
social life: from cooperation to crime, from climate inaction to imperfect
vaccination and epidemic spreading, from antibiotics overuse to biodiversity
preservation. An important, and so far overlooked, aspect of reality is the
diverse strategic identities of individuals. While applying the same strategy
to all interaction partners may be an acceptable assumption for simpler forms
of life, this fails to account} for the behavior of more complex living beings.
For instance, we humans act differently around different people. Here we show
that allowing individuals to adopt different strategies with different partners
yields a very rich evolutionary dynamics, including time-dependent coexistence
of cooperation and defection, system-wide shifts in the dominant strategy, and
maturation in individual choices. Our results are robust to variations in
network type and size, and strategy updating rules. Accounting for diverse
strategic identities thus has far-reaching implications in the mathematical
modeling of social games.
