The Role of Personal Values and Empathy in a Cooperative Game

Magda Osman,Michael J Proulx,Jieyu Lv

doi:10.24297/jssr.v9i2.3782

Magda Osman, Michael J Proulx + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.24297/jssr.v9i2.3782

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Abstract

Are the personal values of others a relevant cue when thinking about cooperating, and do values matter more than empathizing with others? To address these questions, the present study presented participants (N = 120) with the details of personal values (social values [e.g., family, friends] or economic values [e.g., phone, bike]) held by fictitious players of a linear public goods game (PGG). In addition, half those tested were induced to empathize with the other players via presenting perspective-taking instructions (empathy induction), and the other half were not. For those that believed they were interacting with real players in a cooperative game (n=70) values did indeed matter. Participants acted more cooperatively in the Social Value condition as compared to the Economic Value condition when there was empathy induction. While empathy induction (perspective-taking instructions) made little difference to levels of cooperation, it did reduce the use of the tit-for-tat strategy in the game. These findings present some challenges to recent work promoting the role of empathy in pro-social behaviors

Highlights

As the most frequent prosocial behavior [1], cooperation is a lso one of the most investigated topics in social psychology
If empathy is dependent on face-to-face interactions with others that are physically present, we would expect that it would have a limited role in increasing cooperation in a non-face-to-face context in an iterated public goods game (PGG)
We examined if there were group differences based on self-report similarity and self-report empathy of participants‟ personal values and those of the three other players in Social Value and Economic Value conditions

Summary

Introduction

As the most frequent prosocial behavior [1], cooperation is a lso one of the most investigated topics in social psychology. Studies examining cooperation in the experimental lab typically involve economic games such as two -player games (e.g., prisoner‟s dilemma [6], ultimatum game [7, 8] and multi-player games with 4 or more players (e.g., public goods game (PGG) [9, 10] and the common resource dilemma [11, 12] Many of these tasks present participants with a dilemma in which they can choose to perform a selfish but economically beneficial action, or cooperate with another, but gain less financially. In the present study, our first objective is to consider whether empathy has a moderating role in induc ing cooperation in a non-face-to-face social dilemma, in a multi-player game.

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