lecture 8 - altruism, empathy and cooperation part 2

Question 1

cooperation
-why so important
-give an example

Answer 1

Cooperation is part of our evolutionary heritage.

Cooperative child care was necessary due to the vulnerability and dependence of our offspring.

Early humans hunted in cooperative groups

Question 2

-humans have a natural inclination to cooperate for ….
-adversarial relationships can quickly become.. (and vice versa)

Answer 2

common goals
cooperative

Examples include the United States becoming allies with former enemies after WWII and Hutus and Tutsis becoming more collaborative after the Rwandan genocide.

Question 3

what is the prisoners dilemma

Answer 3

The prisoner’s dilemma is an experimental paradigm used to study human cooperation and decision-making.
Participants are asked to choose between cooperating or defecting in a game where payoffs are dependent on the choices of both players.

Question 4

defection in the prisoners dilemma

Answer 4

-defection seems like the ‘rational’ choice to maximise self interest, but leads to a worse outcome for both parties

Question 5

what essential features does the prisoners dilemma capture

Answer 5

The prisoner’s dilemma captures the essential features of many significant real-world situations, such as an arms race between countries (Dawes, 1980;Schelling, 1978).

the game has yielded valuable insights into how people make difficult choices between cooperation and competition ,and how to foster cooperative relations

Question 6

prisoners dilemma.
-what happens in it
-are we more cooperative when ineracting repeatedly over time with the same person

Answer 6

The prisoner’s dilemma game sets up the simplest of situations: participants are involved in just one round with someone they don’t even know.

Of course, our social lives are much more complex.

Very often we interact repeatedly over time with people, in our careers and our relationships.

Are we more cooperative when we interact repeatedly with the same person over time, compared to a one-shot interaction?Indeed we are.

Question 7

reputation
-influences cooperation?

Answer 7

-refers to collective beliefs about an individual’s character that develop within a group or social network.
-influences levels of cooperation

Question 8

studies at work, representing reputation

Answer 8

Studies of people at work find that they quickly develop reputations for being good citizens (cooperators) or “bad apples” (defectors), and that these reputations spread through the organization and persist over time

Question 9

does knowledge about a persons reputation influence levels of cooperation
study
-results

Answer 9

researchers have added a twist to the prisoner’s dilemma game: prior to playing, ppts are told about their partner’s reputation, as being someone who cooperates or defects.

As you would expect, participants will readily cooperate and give resources to an interaction partner whom they know to have a reputation for cooperation, but they will defect and choose not to give resources to interaction partners known to be greedy (Wedekind & Milinski, 2000).

Question 10

how do we come to know each others reputation

Answer 10

Gossip is a way in which reputations spread and individuals can investigate the reputation of others (Feinberg et al., 2012).

Question 11

groups in which gossip takes place are more ______ than those in which it does not.

why is this?

Answer 11

cooperative
-the threat of gossip encourages more cooperative behaviour as individuals become aware of what might happen to their reputations if they act selfishly

Question 12

Construal processes can shape interactions towards cooperative or competitive outcomes

-give an example

Answer 12

Subliminal exposure to hostile words led participants to defect more in a prisoner’s dilemma game

Question 13

subliminal priming and the prisoners dilemma game

Answer 13

Before classic prisoner’s dilemma game, the participants were subliminally “primed” with one of two different sets of stimulus words, ostensibly as part of another experiments.

One group, flashed 22 hostile words(such as competitive, hostile, unfriendly) for 60 milliseconds—too fast for anyone to “see” them and consciously register what they were, but long enough for them to leave a subconscious impression.

other group had a list of normal words

Question 14

subliminal priming and the prisoners dilemma game
results

Answer 14

84% percent who were exposed to the hostile words defected on a majority of the trials in the subsequent prisoner’s dilemma game; only 55% who saw the neutral words did so.

Question 15

can labels influence levels of cooperation
-wall street example

Answer 15

Labels can influence levels of competition and cooperation - calling a game “Wall Street” decreased cooperation compared to calling it “community“
Those playing the community game cooperated on the opening round twice as often as those playing the Wall Street game.

Question 16

influence of subculture on cooperation

Answer 16

the discipline you choose to study in college and eventually apply in your career

Question 17

what does economic theory assume

Answer 17

economic theory assumes that people are rational actors who always act in self interested ways, attempting to maximise their own gains.

Question 18

does training in the discipline of economics encourage people to act more selfishly?
-study on undergraduate economics

Answer 18

Undergraduates majoring in economics and in a variety of other disciplines participated in a single-trial prisoner’s dilemma game (Franket al., 1993).

Seventy-two percent of the economics majors defected on their partners, whereas only 47 percent of those majoring in other disciplines defected.
so yes they are more self interested

Question 19

training in discipline follow up experiment

Answer 19

-follow up exp
-1000 professors in 23 disciplines were asked how much money they gave annually to public television, the united way, and other charitable causes
The economists were twice as likely as all the others to take a free ride on the contributions of their fellow citizens.
-The subculture in which people are immersed appears to powerfully influence their inclination to cooperate with others or look only after themselves.

Question 20

what is the ultimatum game

Answer 20

one player, the allocator, is given a certain amount of money (say, $10); they keep a certain amount and allocates the rest to a second participant, the responder.

The responder can then choose to either accept or reject the allocator’s offer.
If the responder accepts, he receives what was offered and the allocator keeps the balance.

If the responder rejects the offer, neither player receives anything

Question 21

describe the study on the prevalence of cooperation across cultures around the world
-using the ultimatum game
-ppts
-results

Answer 21

Individuals from 15 different small societies were recruited to play the ultimatum game (Henrich et al.,2001). The ppts were foragers, slash-and-burn farmers, nomadic herding groups, and individuals in settled, agriculturalist societies in Africa ,South America, and Indonesia.

What they were allowed to offer an anonymous stranger differed. In some cultures it was money, in others a cherished good such as tobacco.

In the 15 cultures, allocators offered, on average, 39% of the good to anonymous strangers.
In other research across Western cultures, 71 percent of the allocators offered the responder 40–50% of the money (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999).

Question 22

the ultimatum game experiment- explain why these results occured

Answer 22

Researchers looked closely at the 15 cultures to determine what cultural factors predict the likelihood of cooperative generosity in the ultimatum game

One factor stood out: how much the individuals in a culture needed to collaborate with others to gather resources to survive.

Question 23

give examples of differences in the way people from different cultures collaborate

Answer 23

The Machiguenga people of Peru rarely collaborate with members outside of their family to produce food (26% allocation)
The Lamerala of Indonesia, fish in highly collaborative groups of individuals from different families(58%)

Question 24

evolution and cooperation
In The Evolution of Cooperation(1984), political scientist Robert Axelrod asked what question?

Answer 24

How might cooperation emerge in competitive environments governed by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest?
In the context of human evolution, how might non-kin begin to act with an eye toward advancing the welfare of others?

Question 25

cooperation is assumed to be part of our…..

Answer 25

Cooperation is assumed to be part of our evolutionary heritage by Axelrod.
Even in the unlikely contexts of WorldWar I, cooperation frequently emerged among enemies.

Question 26

axelrod study on evolutionary origins of cooperation
-explain the experiment

Answer 26

Axelrod ran a tournament in which players—academics, prize-winning mathematicians, computer hackers, and common folk—were invited to submit computer programs that specified what choices to make on around of the prisoner’s dilemma game, given what had happened on previous rounds (Axelrod, 1984).

In the first tournament, 14 strategies were submitted.

Question 27

axelrod study on evolutionary origins of cooperation
-which strategy was most effective in the game

Answer 27

Each strategy played 200 rounds of the prisoner’s dilemma game with every other strategy.

tit-for-tat strategy, submitted by mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapaport was the winner

Question 28

what is the tit for tat strategy

Answer 28

an approach in the prisoners dilemma game in which the player mimics the other person’s behaviour , whether cooperative or competitive
-this strategy faces well when interacting with other strategies
-axel rod held a second tournament that attracted the submissions of 62 strategies

Question 29

why might the tit for tat strategy be useful in life

Answer 29

tit-for-tat strategy is based on a set of valuable principles for applying when forming friendships, dealing with a difficult personality at work, negotiating with bosses, maintaining long-term romantic relationships, and raising children.

Question 29

five factors of the tit for tat strategy

Answer 29

It is cooperative, and thus encourages mutually supportive action toward a shared goal.
* It is not envious; a partner using this strategy can do extremely well without resorting to competitive behaviour.
* It is not exploitable, meaning it’s not blindly prosocial; if you defect on the tit-for-tat, it will defect on you.
* It is forgiving; that is, it is willing to cooperate at the first cooperative action of the partner, even after long runs of defection and competition.
* It is easy to read; it shouldn’t take long for others to know that the tit-for-tat strategy is being played.