Are smarter groups more cooperative? Evidence from prisoner's dilemma experiments, 1959-2003

Garett Jones

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2008, vol. 68, issue 3-4, 489-497

Abstract: Are more intelligent groups better at cooperating? A meta-study of repeated prisoner's dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5-8% more often for every 100-point increase in the school's average SAT score. This result survives a variety of robustness tests. Axelrod [Axelrod, R., 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, New York] recommends that the way to create cooperation is to encourage players to be patient and perceptive; experimental evidence suggests that more intelligent groups implicitly follow this advice.

Keywords: Intelligence; IQ; Prisoner's; dilemma; Cooperation; Cognitive; ability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (79)

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