A new take on the Prisoner’s Dilemma
https://theconversation.com/how-clever-people-help-societies-work-together-better-93463
In this article, a group of professors performed a study in which they recreated the prisoner’s dilemma but with altercations. In this study, they took a group of about 792 participants and performed the prisoner’s dilemma on these participants. They then performed this same experiment multiple times on the same people and regrouped them into different groups after analyzing the behaviors of the “prisoners” and how their answers were affected by their personalities. For instance, they found that the higher a person’s intelligence, the more likely they were to choose the cooperative option the more they played the game. In the end, they found that the more they played the game, the more cooperative everyone became and everyone was able to benefit from this.
This article is a great example on what we learned in class about Game Theory and how the behavior of one player may affect another. At first, many of the participants were trying to find a dominant strategy to get the most profit for themselves. After playing the same game for multiple rounds as well as the same people and learning the behavior of others, they were eventually able to reach a Nash Equilibrium in which their strategy is a best response to their opponent’s best response because they became more cooperative with each other. In the end after reaching a Nash Equilibrium, everyone was able to overall benefit from this experiment.