Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma with Intragroup Power Dynamics

Ion Juvina, Christian Lebiere, Jolie M. Martin and Cleotilde Gonzalez
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Ion Juvina: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Christian Lebiere: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Jolie M. Martin: Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Cleotilde Gonzalez: Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Games, 2011, vol. 2, issue 1, 1-31

Abstract: The Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma with Intragroup Power Dynamics (IPD^2) is a new game paradigm for studying human behavior in conflict situations. IPD^2 adds the concept of intragroup power to an intergroup version of the standard Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We conducted a laboratory study in which individual human participants played the game against computer strategies of various complexities. The results show that participants tend to cooperate more when they have greater power status within their groups. IPD^2 yields increasing levels of mutual cooperation and decreasing levels of mutual defection, in contrast to a variant of Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma without intragroup power dynamics where mutual cooperation and mutual defection are equally likely. We developed a cognitive model of human decision making in this game inspired by the Instance-Based Learning Theory (IBLT) and implemented within the ACT-R cognitive architecture. This model was run in place of a human participant using the same paradigm as the human study. The results from the model show a pattern of behavior similar to that of human data. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the IPD^2 paradigm can be applied to studying human behavior in conflict situations. In particular, we present the current study as a possible contribution to corroborating the conjecture that democracy reduces the risk of wars.

Keywords: repeated prisoner’s dilemma; intergroup prisoner’s dilemma; intragroup power; cognitive modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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