A Dual-Edged Sword: Empathy and Collective Action in the Prisoner's Dilemma

John A. Sautter, Levente Littvay and Brennen Bearnes
Additional contact information
John A. Sautter: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Levente Littvay: Central European University in Budapest, Hungary
Brennen Bearnes: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2007, vol. 614, issue 1, 154-171

Abstract: Researchers guided by evolutionary psychology have theorized that in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, reciprocal behavior is a product of evolutionary design, where individuals are guided by an innate sense of fairness for equal outcomes. Empathy as a prosocial emotion could be a key to understanding the psychological underpinnings of why and who tends to cooperate in a collective act. In short, why are some individuals more prone to participate in collective action? The authors test the hypothesis that a prosocial psychological disposition, stemming from self-reported empathy, will lead to group-oriented behavior in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. Results suggest that an empathetic disposition does not lead to a higher rate of cooperation but interacts with environmental conditioning to produce either a highly cooperative or highly uncooperative personality type.

Keywords: collective action; egalitarian outcomes; empathy; evolutionary psychology; phenotypic variation; prisoner's dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716207306360 (text/html)

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:sae:anname:v:614:y:2007:i:1:p:154-171

DOI: 10.1177/0002716207306360

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().