Monkeys in a Prisoner’s Dilemma
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00250-0
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415002500?via%3Dihub
In this article, there was a study done from two scientists, Haroush and Williams, whom had monkeys play a game which involves the concept of the prisoner’s dilemma. They start the article with a scenario where they tell the reader that he/she can either pick option C or D and is playing with a stranger who has to also either pick option C or D. If both pick C, then they both get 4$, if both pick D, then they both get $2. If one picks C and the other picks D, then the first person gets the bigger award at $6 and the other person gets the smallest at $1. This scenario is related to an idea we have talked about in class that is called the prisoner’s dilemma. The definition of prisoner’s dilemma is that in game theory two individuals might not corporate together, even though when looking at the payoffs it seems that it is in their best interest to do so.
This idea was then tried in a study with two monkeys who sat side by side and had to make decisions to obtain certain amounts of juice. The game was put in a way that neither of the monkeys could know what the other monkey chose until both of them made a selection. This came out to be that in 34.7% of the trails the monkeys chose cooperation over not cooperating. It must also be said that the monkeys could not understand the game until they did many trails and also it is hard to determine if the monkey knows how much juice the other monkey got during the game. Interestingly, the monkeys were more likely to chose option C in the following trail if the other monkey chose option C in the trail before and vice versa with option D. Lastly, in order to understand if the monkey was able to determine what the payoff’s were, the monkey was aware of what the other monkey would chose before the game started. In this scenario, the monkey chooses option D an astounding %90 of the time if the opponent has chosen option D beforehand. This topic clearly relates to the topic of game theory and also prisoner’s dilemma, both of which we have talked about in class this year.