I had my intro Ethics students play an anonymous Prisoner’s Dilemma with candy earlier this week—two one-shot, one iterated thrice. Although they didn’t know who their own partners were, I had no good way to conceal who got no candy because someone had defected to their cooperation, who walked away with ten pieces looking smug, who had to settle for two, and who got five for mutual cooperation. This didn’t appear to influence their behavior at all—actually, apart from the one star student who chose to attend that day and some of the people who managed consistent cooperation during the iteration, none of them looked like they had much of a strategy, even though most of them seemed motivated by the candy. I guess $20 is a larger payoff than the amounts of candy I was working with, but this being a game and the payoffs coming from without (i.e. they aren’t managing resources they already have, but negotiating the split of a non-player’s donation), it doesn’t seem likely that there would be too much long-term animosity over it except in choosing how to behave with future games of the same type.
Some of them seemed to be playing randomly. Some of them decided that they didn’t like the game (too hard to understand, they weren’t getting enough candy, whatever) and cooperated in spite of partner defection as a way of checking out of the game. One guy didn’t even want to know what his partner had done last time during the iteration, he just defected every time—I guess that could be called a strategy, especially since he wound up with a randomly-playing partner that time.
Thanks. So they saw the game as another nuisance that the teachers thought up… As my game theory book says, “there’s really no point in playing poker except for sums of money it would really hurt to lose”.
I didn’t think that asking them all to put up cash would have gone over well, or I might have tried it. Besides, I got reimbursed for the candy and got to keep the leftovers.
I had my intro Ethics students play an anonymous Prisoner’s Dilemma with candy earlier this week—two one-shot, one iterated thrice. Although they didn’t know who their own partners were, I had no good way to conceal who got no candy because someone had defected to their cooperation, who walked away with ten pieces looking smug, who had to settle for two, and who got five for mutual cooperation. This didn’t appear to influence their behavior at all—actually, apart from the one star student who chose to attend that day and some of the people who managed consistent cooperation during the iteration, none of them looked like they had much of a strategy, even though most of them seemed motivated by the candy. I guess $20 is a larger payoff than the amounts of candy I was working with, but this being a game and the payoffs coming from without (i.e. they aren’t managing resources they already have, but negotiating the split of a non-player’s donation), it doesn’t seem likely that there would be too much long-term animosity over it except in choosing how to behave with future games of the same type.
Do you mean that they played randomly, or that they defected without articulating why?
Some of them seemed to be playing randomly. Some of them decided that they didn’t like the game (too hard to understand, they weren’t getting enough candy, whatever) and cooperated in spite of partner defection as a way of checking out of the game. One guy didn’t even want to know what his partner had done last time during the iteration, he just defected every time—I guess that could be called a strategy, especially since he wound up with a randomly-playing partner that time.
Thanks. So they saw the game as another nuisance that the teachers thought up… As my game theory book says, “there’s really no point in playing poker except for sums of money it would really hurt to lose”.
I didn’t think that asking them all to put up cash would have gone over well, or I might have tried it. Besides, I got reimbursed for the candy and got to keep the leftovers.