Abstract:
Humans and other animals often behave cooperatively, despite there being no apparent or at least immediate payoff for doing so. We can make sense of cooperation as a maximising behaviour in an iterated or repeated-play scenario, when events preceding and following a cooperative act are taken into account. Conditional cooperation is analogous to making a (fitness) investment presently, with the expectation of a greater return later in time. However, doing so requires a degree of patience, or self-control: the ability to defer a small reward in the immediate or short term in order to reap larger, long-term benefits. We adapted the Sharing Game (Fantino & Kennelly, 2009) to allow for iterated play, and compared performance to that on a standard delay discounting task to examine the possibility of a link between self-control and cooperation in this novel task. The Sharing Game is unique among economic games as optimal choice in the task necessitates allocating a relatively larger payoff to an opponent. While self-control does not appear to be implicated in the Iterated Sharing Game (ISG), we propose that the ISG is an effective tool in assessing conditional cooperation and sensitivity to reciprocal strategies such as tit-for-tat (TFT). We find that participants can rapidly adopt optimal strategies against TFT, even in the absence of explicit feedback or knowledge about the contingencies presented in the task. We suggest that cooperative behaviour in the ISG is sensitive to environmental contingencies, but also consider individual factors such gender and personality that may interact with contextual variables and contribute to performance.
