IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

Empirical Evidence of Upward Social Comparison in a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game

  • Matthieu Nadini,
  • Peerayos Pongsachai,
  • Chiara Spinello,
  • Daniel A. Burbano-L,
  • Maurizio Porfiri

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2981094
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 52884 – 52894

Abstract

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A large body of work has offered compelling evidence of the influence of social context on individual decision-making, but the reasons why individuals tend to cooperate with others remain elusive. The prisoner's dilemma constitutes a powerful, yet elementary, social game to study the drivers underlying cooperation. Here, we empirically examined a prisoner's dilemma game where small groups of participants played with controlled, virtual players over a series of rounds. Toward investigating how individual decisions on cooperation are influenced by others, the virtual players were engineered so that they would have a higher cumulative score than some participants and a lower cumulative score than others. Our results corroborate upward social comparison theory, whereby only participants who had a lower cumulative score than cooperating virtual players displayed an increased tendency to cooperate. Overall, our experimental findings indicate that the players' cumulative score plays a critical role within the prisoner's dilemma game, thereby offering a mean for increasing cooperation. For practitioners, this finding sheds light on how players' cumulative score alone modulates decision-making processes toward choices that are suboptimal for the individual, but optimal for the entire group.

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