“Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Is it really a dilemma?
Prisoner’s dilemma is a situation in which two players each have two options whose outcome depends greatly on the simultaneous choice. The police holding the interrogation tells each suspect that if one suspect, say A, confesses and the partner, B, does not confess, A will be realized. And if both confess, both A and B will be convicted. In this situation, it is originally believed that since two prisoners are separate and in a situation where they cannot communicate, they are more likely to confess to a crime, not having trust each other. In Networks class, we discussed that betraying a partner is the dominant strategy all the time since it possesses higher payoff in a simultaneous game. A famous American business news website, Business Insider introduced that surprisingly in real life, prisoners are far more cooperative than originally expected.
Menush Khadjavi and Andreas Lange conducted an interesting experiment. They put a group of prisoners and students in a prison- Lower Saxony’s primary women’s prison. In the experiment, of course, instead of using year off sentences for the payoffs, payoffs for students are euros and for prisoners are coffee and cigarettes. Moreover, this experiment was conducted through not only simultaneous but also sequential versions. The researchers expected that humans are more cooperative than originally thought. It means that in real life, people would react differently compared to the rational model that economists traditionally use. And the results showed the researchers’ expectation to be true; only 37% of students cooperated and 56% of inmates cooperated. This results implied that prisoners are not necessarily as calculating, self-interested and un-trusting as many people assume. They are rather trusting.
Don’t underestimate prisoners! They will not act as you expect. They will trust each other and not confess their crimes.
Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268113001522