The Persistence of Trust: Further Tests of the Cooperators'Advantage

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In many problems of shared resources, often termed "public goods," or problems where the decision outcome of one person depends highly on the behavior of others, important research questions arise about the nature of trust and cooperative or defective behavior. In such situations, cooperation works to the advantage of the group but individuals are privately better off not cooperating. Experimental evidence from games that reflect the conditions of highly interdependent outcomes and optional participation, shows that (1) people who intend cooperation are more willing than defectors to enter into such situations (i.e. to "trust"); (2) cooperators are relatively more successful regarding rewards from the experimental games than the defectors, hence the term, "cooperators' advantage;" and (3) neither intending cooperators nor intending defectors have special capacity to recognize the intentions of strangers, meaning that the cooperators' advantage comes exclusively from the disproportionate probability of participation with other cooperators. This suggests that players decide to participate by a heuristic where they project their own intentions to others. This research will further test the robustness of these results by investigating the effects of experience on the heuristic that gives rise to the cooperators' advantage. Competing hypotheses predict: (1) that repeated "sampling" of partners from the population pool will lead expectations to converge such that the cooperators' advantage is eliminated; or (2) that available samples of others' behavior are biased and provide both intending cooperators and intending defectors with confirming evidence of their original expectations and thus, stimulate little adjustment from experience. These hypotheses will be tested by providing subjects with various types of feedback about the choices of others. The findings will bear on the possibility of cooperation evolving independently of tit-for-tat or other incentive-based mechanisms discussed in the literature.