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| via shutterstock.com |
What drives people to cooperate with each other?
And what characteristics lead a person to do something that will both benefit
them, and those around them? Our new research suggests that the answer is intelligence: it is the primary
condition for a socially cohesive and cooperative society.
In the past, some economists have suggested
that consideration of others and generally pro-social attitudes are what motivate people towards more generous and
cooperative behaviours which help sustain a cohesive society. Others have
suggested that adhering to good norms and respecting institutions push us
towards more socially useful behaviours.
But another possibility is that insightful
self-interest guides us to become effectively good citizens – and that
cooperation arises in society if people are smart enough to foresee the social
consequences of their actions, including the consequences for others.
The prisoner’s dilemma
Our study, which took part in behavioural labs in
the US and UK with 792 participants, was designed to test these three different
suggestions for why people cooperate with each other. In it, we used games that
contain a set of rules that assign a reward to two players depending on their
decisions.
One of these games was the prisoner’s dilemma
game. The easiest way to describe the game is using the original example of two
criminals who have been arrested. They are interrogated in separate rooms with
no means of communicating with each other. Each prisoner is given the
opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed
the crime – an uncooperative choice – or to cooperate with the other by
remaining silent.
If both prisoners betray each other, they each
serve two years in prison – the uncooperative outcome. If one betrays the other
and the other remains silent, the first will be set free and the other will
serve three years in prison – and vice versa. If both remain silent, they will
only serve one year in prison – the cooperative outcome.
This is a standard example of a game analysed in
game theory that shows why two completely rational individuals might not
cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interest to do so. It is
also a good example of a non zero-sum game – where the cooperative behaviour is
mutually beneficial. In general, it depicts a situation reflecting the
properties of the interactions we all experience most frequently in society.
As usual in experimental economics, we had
participants play this game with monetary payoffs – instead of imprisonment. We
matched two subjects in the same session in an anonymous way and we let them
play the same game repeatedly for an indefinite number of times. After that, we
re-matched them with a different partner and the game started again. And this
went on for 45 minutes. Each player learns by adjusting their decisions based
on how others in the same room have played in the past.
Intelligence sparks cooperation
We then created two “cities”, or groups of
subjects, sorted by characteristics based on cognitive and personality traits
that we had measured two days earlier, by asking the participants to fill in a
standard questionnaire. One such characteristic was a measure of pro-social
attitudes, namely the personality trait of agreeableness. Another
characteristic was a measure of adherence to norms, specifically the
personality trait of conscientiousness. The third characteristic was that of
intelligence.
We then analysed the frequency of cooperative
choices they made in the prisoner’s dilemma game – so the number of times they
chose the less selfish option. From this we calculated what we called the
cooperation rate.
Overall, we found that the higher a person’s
intelligence, the more cooperative they became as they continued playing the
prisoner’s dilemma game. So while intelligent individuals are not inherently
more cooperative, they have the ability to process information faster and to
learn from it. We didn’t see such stark differences for the other two groups –
those that scored highly in agreeableness and conscientiousness.
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| Cooperation
rate across intelligence groups. Author provided |
Helping each other
It’s possible that smarter people may try to use
their cognitive advantage and take advantage of others. So in further analysis,
we created combined “cities”, grouping together people who are similar across
all characteristics in the personality test, and have similar levels of
intelligence. We observed something quite different.
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| Cooperation rate across combined groups. Author provided |
As the graph above shows, the smarter individuals
– the blue line – within these combined groups helped to teach the less smart
ones – the red line – and lead them to eventually increase their cooperation
rate by the end of the experiment. This was eventually beneficial for all
involved: on average, everyone was better off in terms of earnings. Taken
together, these results show how even having a few intelligent people present in
a group or the workplace can benefit others.
As other recent research has looked at how education can help from early childhood to develop cognitive ability, our results indicate how such interventions need not only benefit each individual, but society as a whole.
Originally published on THE CONVERSATION
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