The Prisoner's Dilemma and Cooperation

[differenceblog]

The Prisoner's Dilemma is an economic/altruism game model popular for testing gender differences in cooperation. John List (2006) studied the results of the game show Friend or Foe? which had a Prisoner's Dilemma-type premise, and found not only that all-male groups cooperated less than all-female groups, but that males tended to cooperate less with females than with other males. Ortmann and Tichy (1999) guessed that women would be more cooperative than men, and that this was true in the first round, but in subsequent rounds, men and women reacted similarly to the other players. Boone et al (1999) also found that women were slightly more cooperative than men, but found that all groups got more cooperative as the game was repeated. It is worth pointing out, however, that Frank et al (1993) found that the effect of studying economics was stronger than the effect of gender.

The Prisoner's Dilemma game needs another option, which seems to be the one I see exercised most often. Rather than "I betray you to benefit myself" there needs to be a third option for "I betray you at a cost to myself, because it may hurt you more than it hurts me." I call it "revenge" and I see it crop up in men and women in real-life scenarios all the time.