The effect of attachment and environmental manipulations on cooperative behavior in the prisoner’s dilemma game

Taheri, Maliheh; Rotshtein, Pia; Beierholm, Ulrik

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0205730

The effect of attachment and environmental manipulations on cooperative behavior in the prisoner’s dilemma game

Taheri, Maliheh; Rotshtein, Pia; Beierholm, Ulrik

Authors

Maliheh Taheri

Pia Rotshtein

Dr Ulrik Beierholm ulrik.beierholm@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

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.

Citation

Taheri, M., Rotshtein, P., & Beierholm, U. (2018). The effect of attachment and environmental manipulations on cooperative behavior in the prisoner’s dilemma game. PLoS ONE, 13(11), Article e0205730. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205730

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Oct 1, 2018
Online Publication Date	Nov 12, 2018
Publication Date	Nov 12, 2018
Deposit Date	Nov 13, 2018
Publicly Available Date	Nov 13, 2018
Journal	PLoS ONE
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	13
Issue	11
Article Number	e0205730
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205730

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Copyright Statement
© 2018 Taheri et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.