Personality Factors that Influence Decision Making in the Prisoner’s Dilemma
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a classic problem in game theory that explores decision-making and cooperation between two individuals. In class, we examined the Prisoner’s Dilemma from a strictly theoretical perspective, but these situations do not occur in a vacuum. In reality, human behavior is probabilistic; we are not bots that automatically default to the dominant strategy when presented with a problem. So what happens when we simulate a Prisoner’s Dilemma in real life?
Deutchman and Sullivan investigated how individuals high in three personality traits known as the “Dark Triad” would behave in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. The “Dark Triad” is composed of the traits of narcissism (sense of self-superiority), Machiavellianism (lack of morality and manipulativeness), and psychopathy (combination of impulsivity and anti-social tendencies). The Prisoner’s Dilemma is typically used as a test of cooperation in previous psychology research, however, Sullivan and Deutchman decided to alter this by making their study a one-round game, eliminating revenge-based retribution as a factor for decision making. The researchers also framed the problem in two different contexts: a gain-loss (economic) context and a social context.
Deutchman and Sullivan found that those that scored high on the “Dark Triad” were much more likely to choose the dominant strategy of defecting and that they were more likely to defect in the economic context compared to the social context. We can see that differences in strategy exist between differing contexts, even among individuals expected to be self-serving. In the end, while game theory can help us analyze complex choices and offer insights into human behavior, it’s clear that the dominant strategy is not always the human one.