A series of experiments performed in (of all places) a truck driving school investigated a Window Game. Two players are seated at a desk with a partition between them; there is a small window in the partition. Player A gets $5 and may pass as much of that as she wants through the window to Player B. Player B may then pass as much as she wants back through the window to Player A, after which the game ends. All money that passes through the window is tripled; eg if Player A passes the entire $5 through it becomes $15, and if Player B passes the $15 back it becomes $45 – making passing a lucrative strategy but one requiring lots of trust in the other player. I got briefly nerd-sniped trying to figure out the best (morally correct?) strategy here, but getting back to the point: players with high-IQ were more likely to pass money through the window. They were also more likely to reciprocate – ie repay good for good and bad for bad. In a Public Goods Game (each of N players starts with $10 and can put as much or as little as they like into a pot; afterwards the pot is tripled and redistributed to all players evenly, contributors and noncontributors alike), high-IQ players put more into the pot. They were also more likely to vote for rules penalizing noncontributors. They were also more likely to cooperate and more likely to play closer to traditional tit-for-tat on iterated prisoners’ dilemmas. The longer and more complicated the game, the more clearly a pattern emerged: having one high-IQ player was moderately good, but having all the players be high-IQ was amazing: they all caught on quickly, cooperated with one another, and built stable systems to enforce that cooperation. In a ten-round series run by Jones himself, games made entirely of high-IQ players had five times as much cooperation as average.
Only if you assume that IQ is independent of altruism. Given that IQ covaries with altruism, patience, willingness to invest, willingness to trust strangers, etc, I don’t see why you would make that assumption. I’m fine with believing that greater IQ also causes more cooperation and altruism and so high IQ players understand better how to exploit others but don’t want to. If anything, the results suggest that the relationships may have been underestimated, because lower IQ subjects’ responses will be a mix of incompetence & selfishness, adding measurement error.
That sounds like it would contradict the results on IQ correlating positively with cooperation:
Only if you assume that IQ is independent of altruism. Given that IQ covaries with altruism, patience, willingness to invest, willingness to trust strangers, etc, I don’t see why you would make that assumption. I’m fine with believing that greater IQ also causes more cooperation and altruism and so high IQ players understand better how to exploit others but don’t want to. If anything, the results suggest that the relationships may have been underestimated, because lower IQ subjects’ responses will be a mix of incompetence & selfishness, adding measurement error.
Good point.