Abstract
We report the results of a game-theoretic experiment with human players who solve problems of increasing complexity by cooperating in groups of increasing size. Our experimental environment is set up to make it complicated for players to use rational calculation for making the cooperative decisions. This environment is directly translated into a computer simulation, from which we extract the collaboration strategy that leads to the maximal attainable score. Based on this, we measure the error that players make when estimating the benefits of collaboration, and find that humans massively underestimate these benefits when facing easy problems or working alone or in small groups. In contrast, when confronting hard problems or collaborating in large groups, humans accurately judge the best level of collaboration and easily achieve the maximal score. Our findings are independent on groups’ composition and players’ personal traits. We interpret them as varying degrees of usefulness of social heuristics, which seems to depend on the size of the involved group and the complexity of the situation.
Highlights
Cooperation allows to solve problems that are too complex for anyone to solve individually
We found that humans match the optimal strategy only in large groups or when solving hard problems
We found that in our experiment humans perform best when joined in large groups to solve problems they see as difficult
Summary
We present our findings by comparing the experimental and simulated values of agent fitness (AF vs. AFbest) and of average probability of cooperation (C vs. Cbest). For groups of moderate size (b and c), humans increasingly better guess the optimal cooperation level Their guesses are improving as the problems get harder, and for hardest problems the estimations are correct. One may think that while under-performing for the case of their individual benefit (measured by AF), human choose the level of collaboration that maximizes the common benefit, measured by group bonus GB This is not the case: we compare the human GB with the optimal GBbest in the Supplement, and find a very similar pattern to what found for AF: human level of collaboration generates best GBbest only when facing hardest problems or when working in the largest group, and fails under other conditions. This further confirms that R and S are the only relevant variables affecting the collaborative behavior of players and the findings cannot be attributed to players’ personal characteristics
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