Abstract
Cooperation is commonly defined as an individual’s choice that benefits both themself and others, in contrast to selfishness, which benefits the individual only. Cooperative behavior is more likely to occur when the benefit to others, discounted as a function of social distance (i.e., social discounting), is higher than the nondiscounted cost of cooperation Rachlin, H. & Locey, M. L. (Behavioural Processes 87, 25-33, 2011). We tested five 2-player prisoner’s dilemma reward matrices with 117 participants, among which both nondiscounted cost and socially discounted benefit varied systematically. Costs and benefits were defined, respectively, as the amount the participant lost and the amount the other player won when the participant cooperated. In global terms, systematically increasing costs and decreasing benefits of cooperation decreased the percentage of participants who cooperated, as predicted. These results suggest that the balance of costs and benefits of cooperation is useful for predicting cooperative behavior in social situations, such as prisoner’s dilemma games.
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05 January 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-022-00530-0
Notes
The phenomenon and the procedure of social discounting have also been suggested as a metric for altruistic and selfish behavior. Altruism is an individual’s choice that benefits others but not oneself. In contrast, cooperation benefits both parties (Rachlin, 2016).
Jones (2007) asked 44 participants each to imagine a list of 100 people close to them and then to imagine themselves with those people on a vast open field. The author asked each participant to assign to some people on the list a physical distance, representing the level of closeness maintained with them. All the physical distances were converted to feet. Jones found that the function that best described the relation between ordinal and physical social distances was a power function, which was as follows: N = 2.1D0.45. The author asked another 50 students to indicate the physical distance at which they would place a random classmate, which was 2,300 feet. Substituting this value in the previous equation, N ≈ 75.
The hypothetical value of each unit was US$100.
Locey, Jones, and Rachlin (2011) used a 1-2-5-6 matrix in a prisoner’s dilemma game in order to compare the effects of real versus hypothetical rewards on cooperation; however, the cost–benefit balance as responsible of cooperation was not tested.
Locey, Safin et al. (2013) expressed the reward units to the participants in hundreds of dollars.
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Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the grant 729552 given to the first author by CONACYT for the doctoral project 930054 and by the PAPIIT grant IN303213 given to the second author by DGAPA, National Autonomous University of Mexico. We thank Howard Rachlin, Vasiliy Safin, and Edward Dong for their suggestions.
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The original online version of this article was revised: The Acknowledgement section has been updated from: "Acknowledgement This research was supported by a grant (PAPIIT IN303213) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. We thank Howard Rachlin, Vasily Safin, and Edward Dong for their suggestions." to: "Acknowledgement This research was supported by the grant 729552 given to the first author by CONACYT for the doctoral project 930054 and by the PAPIIT grant IN303213 given to the second author by DGAPA, National Autonomous University of Mexico. We thank Howard Rachlin, Vasiliy Safin, and Edward Dong for their suggestions."
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Toledo, A.C., Avila, R. Nondiscounted Costs and Socially Discounted Benefits as Predictors of Cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma Games. Psychol Rec 71, 167–178 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-020-00448-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-020-00448-5