The effect of attachment and environmental manipulations on cooperative behavior in the prisoner’s dilemma game

Maliheh Taheri, Pia Rotshtein and Ulrik Beierholm

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-17

Abstract: Cooperation and competition are vital for human survival and for social progress. In this study we examine the impact of external (environmental) and internal (individual differences) factors on the tendency to cooperate or compete in social conflicts. To this end, 53 young adults played blocks of the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game with each other or with a computer. The environmental context was manipulated across blocks, by introducing uncertainty, randomly losing or gaining money. Individual differences were assessed by participants’ attachment style. We found that participants cooperated more when randomly losing money compared to when randomly winning or in the neutral condition. Moreover, in a negative uncertain environment, individuals with higher anxious and avoidant attachment styles cooperated less. The above effects were only observed when playing against a human and not a computer. Overall, the findings highlight the dependency of cooperative behavior on the context as driven by external and internal factors.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0205730 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 05730&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0205730

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205730

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().