Abstract
Expectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function. In the Dictator game (DG), people expect generous behavior from others even if they cannot enforce any sharing of the pie. Here we assume that people donate following their expectations, and that they update their expectations after playing a DG by reinforcement learning to construct a model that explains the main experimental results in the DG. Full agreement with the experimental results is reached when some degree of mismatch between expectations and donations is added into the model. These results are robust against the presence of envious agents, but affected if we introduce selfish agents that do not update their expectations. Our results point to social norms being on the basis of the generous behavior observed in the DG and also to the wide applicability of reinforcement learning to explain many strategic interactions.
Highlights
Expectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function
Social norms can serve to choose among different Nash equilibria in social complex environments –games– where individuals face strategic interactions[9, 10] and drive behavior in non-strategic settings where individuals can choose actions depending on their expectations of others and the degree to which these actions are seen appropriate[11]
A well-suited framework to study expectations is the dictator game (DG for short), which has provided a large body of experimental evidence on altruistic behaviour in the lab during the last thirty years[12, 13]
Summary
Expectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function. In the Dictator game (DG), people expect generous behavior from others even if they cannot enforce any sharing of the pie. We assume that people donate following their expectations, and that they update their expectations after playing a DG by reinforcement learning to construct a model that explains the main experimental results in the DG. Expectations which drive behavior become social norms[6] to which most people conform, leading to an overall cooperative performance of the society[7, 8]. We have found that even if we elicit expectations from people in different roles, or from external observers of the social interaction, or from subjects socially distant because they refer to a previous experimental session, or when the money at stake is large, we always find that people expect generous behavior. People have a behavior that is very correlated with their expectations, which supports the role of expectations in the formation of social norms (see refs 11, 20 and 21)
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