Abstract
In recent years, significant advances have been made in understanding the adaptive (ultimate) and mechanistic (proximate) explanations for the evolution and maintenance of cooperation. Studies of cooperative behaviour in humans invariably use economic games. These games have provided important insights into the mechanisms that maintain economic and social cooperation in our species. However, they usually rely on the division of monetary tokens which are given to participants by the investigator. The extent to which behaviour in such games may reflect behaviour in the real world of biological markets – where money must be earned and behavioural strategies incur real costs and benefits – is unclear. To provide new data on the potential scale of this problem, we investigated whether people behaved differently in two standard economic games (public goods game and dictator game) when they had to earn their monetary endowments through the completion of dull or physically demanding tasks, as compared with simply being given the endowment. The requirement for endowments to be ‘earned’ through labour did not affect behaviour in the dictator game. However, the requirement to complete a dull task reduced cooperation in the public goods game among the subset of participants who were not familiar with game theory. There has been some effort to test whether the conclusions drawn from standard, token-based cooperation games adequately reflect cooperative behaviour ‘in the wild.’ However, given the almost total reliance on such games to study cooperation, more exploration of this issue would be welcome. Our data are not unduly worrying, but they do suggest that further exploration is needed if we are to make general inferences about human behaviour from the results of structured economic games.
Highlights
Cooperation – where one individual’s actions increase the fitness of another – can be favoured by natural selection for two reasons
One-third of participants felt that they owned the money they had been given, and this did not vary across treatments (10/30 for M, 12/30 for Task 1 (T1) and Task 2 (T2): x22 = 0.378, p = 0.828)
We found that people who completed the dull task and were unfamiliar with game theory cooperated less than the control and difficult task groups in the public goods game
Summary
Cooperation – where one individual’s actions increase the fitness of another – can be favoured by natural selection for two reasons. Cooperation can increase the actor’s reproductive success (i.e. cooperation confers direct fitness benefits); second, the actor can direct cooperation at individuals who carry the cooperative gene (i.e. cooperation confers indirect fitness benefits) [1,2]. Our own species possesses a variety of behavioural adaptations that promote apparently selfless behaviour. These ‘proximate’ explanations (sensu [6,7]; see [8]) of sociality include a tendency toward direct This work helps to explain why, when people play anonymous one-shot economic games, they cooperate more than would be expected if they were purely self-interested [19,20,21]
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