34 research outputs found
Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly
observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments
with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they
should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own
individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects:
some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting
cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this
heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We
have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as
a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else
beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous
Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity
aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of
people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with
cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and
cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour
makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think
malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more
Fostering Cooperation through the Enhancement of Own Vulnerability
We consider the possibility that cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma is fostered by people's voluntarily enhancement of their own vulnerability. The vulnerability of a player determines the effectiveness of possible punishment by the other. In the "Gradual" mechanism, players may condition their incremental enhancements of their vulnerability on the other's choices. In the "Leap" mechanism, they unconditionally choose their vulnerability. In our experiment, subjects only learn to cooperate when either one of these mechanisms is allowed. In agreement with theory, subjects aiming for cooperation choose higher vulnerability levels in Gradual than in Leap, which maps into higher mutual cooperation levels