A large body of work has offered compelling evidence of the influence of social context on individual decision-making, but the reasons why individuals tend to cooperate with others remain elusive. The prisoner’s dilemma constitutes a powerful, yet elementary, social game to study the drivers underlying cooperation. Here, we empirically examined a prisoner’s dilemma game where small groups of participants played with controlled, virtual players over a series of rounds. Toward investigating how individual decisions on cooperation are influenced by others, the virtual players were engineered so that they would have a higher cumulative score than some participants and a lower cumulative score than others. Our results corroborate upward social comparison theory, whereby only participants who had a lower cumulative score than cooperating virtual players displayed an increased tendency to cooperate. Overall, our experimental findings indicate that the players’ cumulative score plays a critical role within the prisoner’s dilemma game, thereby offering a mean for increasing cooperation. For practitioners, this finding sheds light on how players’ cumulative score alone modulates decision-making processes toward choices that are suboptimal for the individual, but optimal for the entire group.

中文翻译：

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囚徒困境博弈中向上社会比较的经验证据

大量工作提供了令人信服的证据，证明社会环境对个人决策的影响，但个人倾向于与他人合作的原因仍然难以捉摸。囚徒困境构成了一个强大但基本的社交游戏，用于研究合作背后的驱动因素。在这里，我们凭经验检验了一个囚徒困境博弈，在该博弈中，一小群参与者与受控的虚拟玩家在一系列回合中进行游戏。为了调查个人合作决定如何受到他人的影响，虚拟玩家被设计成他们的累积分数高于某些参与者，而累积分数低于其他参与者。我们的结果证实了向上的社会比较理论，只有累积分数低于合作虚拟玩家的参与者才会表现出更高的合作倾向。总的来说，我们的实验结果表明，参与者的累积得分在囚徒困境博弈中起着关键作用，从而提供了一种增加合作的手段。对于从业者来说，这一发现阐明了玩家的累积分数如何单独调节决策过程，以做出对个人而言次优但对整个群体而言最优的选择。