Impulsiveness does not prevent cooperation from emerging but reduces its occurrence: an experiment with zebra finches

Camille Chia,Frédérique Dubois

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-09072-w

Camille Chia, Frédérique Dubois

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-09072-w

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Aug 17, 2017
Citations: 1	License type: open-access

Affiliation: Université de Montréal

Abstract

Reciprocal altruism, the most probable mechanism for cooperation among unrelated individuals, can be modelled as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. This game predicts that cooperation should evolve whenever the players, who expect to interact repeatedly, make choices contingent to their partner’s behaviour. Experimental evidence, however, indicates that reciprocity is rare among animals. One reason for this would be that animals are very impulsive compared to humans. Several studies have reported that temporal discounting (that is, strong preferences for immediate benefits) has indeed a negative impact on the occurrence of cooperation. Yet, the role of impulsive action, another facet of impulsiveness, remains unexplored. Here, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which male and female zebra finches (Taenyopigia guttata) were paired assortatively with respect to their level of impulsive action and then played an alternating Prisoner’s Dilemma. As anticipated, we found that self-controlled pairs achieved high levels of cooperation by using a Generous Tit-for-Tat strategy, while impulsive birds that cooperated at a lower level, chose to cooperate with a fixed probability. If the inability of impulsive individuals to use reactive strategies are due to their reduced working memory capacity, thus our findings might contribute to explaining interspecific differences in cooperative behaviour.

Highlights

The evolution and maintenance of cooperation among non-kin has posed a major challenge to evolutionary biologists and social scientists
Other studies have demonstrated that both pigeons and blue jays were capable of maintaining high levels of cooperation but only when the effect of temporal discounting was reduced[17,18,19]
In order to explore the effect of impulsive action on cooperation in an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD), we used impulsive-assorted pairs of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and tested whether their ability to achieve and sustain high levels of cooperation in an alternating Prisoner’s Dilemma was affected by their level of impulsive action

Summary

Introduction

The evolution and maintenance of cooperation among non-kin has posed a major challenge to evolutionary biologists and social scientists. Reciprocal altruism, one of the most probable explanations for cooperation among unrelated individuals, has been modelled as a Prisoner’s Dilemma[1] In this two-player game, each player can choose to either defect or cooperate. Several authors have pointed out that temporal discounting (i.e. strong preferences for immediate benefits), one aspect of impulsiveness, would prevent animals from achieving high levels of cooperation in an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD). Experimental studies with humans and rats have reported that individuals with higher levels of self-control in a temporal-discounting task (i.e. less impulsive individuals) were more likely to cooperate against an opponent that was adopting a TFT strategy[16, 20, 21]. St-Pierre et al.[29] have demonstrated that zebra finches were capable of maintaining high levels of cooperation in an IPD game, but only when they were interacting with their social partner, with whom they have established a long-lasting relationship

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