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.
Highlights
Cooperation and competition are vital for our survival in a complex social environment [1]
We focus on the impact of the environmental uncertainty, and how individuals with different relational attachment style react to it in a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG)
The distribution of attachment style scores matched responses reported in the healthy population [26] (RAAS-anxiety: mean = 2.72, median = 2.83; Revised Adult Attachment Scale (RAAS) avoidance: mean = 2.81, median = 2.75; ERC-anxiety mean = 3.41 and median = 3.29; ERC avoidance mean = 2.98 and median = 3.11)
Summary
Cooperation and competition are vital for our survival in a complex social environment [1]. The tension between cooperative and competitive behavior is emphasized in a conflict situation. An example is social dilemmas where the interests of the collective are in conflict with the individual’s self-interest [2]. In traditional economic theories decisions are assumed to reflect a ‘rational choice’, aimed to maximize individual gain [3]. In the context of social dilemma, cooperation is suggested to be driven by social factors [6,7,8], emotional context [9,10,11,12] and personality traits [13,14,15]. We focus on the impact of the environmental uncertainty, and how individuals with different relational attachment style react to it in a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG)
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