Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2011;6(11):e27623. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027623. Epub 2011 Nov 16.
In recent years, significant advances have been made in understanding the adaptive (ultimate) and mechanistic (proximate) explanations for the evolution and maintenance of cooperation. Studies of cooperative behaviour in humans invariably use economic games. These games have provided important insights into the mechanisms that maintain economic and social cooperation in our species. However, they usually rely on the division of monetary tokens which are given to participants by the investigator. The extent to which behaviour in such games may reflect behaviour in the real world of biological markets--where money must be earned and behavioural strategies incur real costs and benefits--is unclear. To provide new data on the potential scale of this problem, we investigated whether people behaved differently in two standard economic games (public goods game and dictator game) when they had to earn their monetary endowments through the completion of dull or physically demanding tasks, as compared with simply being given the endowment. The requirement for endowments to be 'earned' through labour did not affect behaviour in the dictator game. However, the requirement to complete a dull task reduced cooperation in the public goods game among the subset of participants who were not familiar with game theory. There has been some effort to test whether the conclusions drawn from standard, token-based cooperation games adequately reflect cooperative behaviour 'in the wild.' However, given the almost total reliance on such games to study cooperation, more exploration of this issue would be welcome. Our data are not unduly worrying, but they do suggest that further exploration is needed if we are to make general inferences about human behaviour from the results of structured economic games.
近年来，人们在理解合作的进化和维持的适应性（终极）和机械论（近因）解释方面取得了重大进展。对人类合作行为的研究总是使用经济博弈。这些游戏为维持我们物种的经济和社会合作的机制提供了重要的见解。然而，它们通常依赖于货币代币的划分，这些代币由研究者分发给参与者。在这种游戏中的行为在多大程度上可能反映出生物市场的真实世界中的行为——在这个市场中，金钱必须赚取，行为策略会产生真正的成本和收益——尚不清楚。为了提供关于这个问题潜在规模的新数据，我们调查了当人们必须通过完成枯燥或体力要求高的任务来赚取货币赠与时，与简单地获得赠与时，他们在两个标准经济游戏（公共物品游戏和独裁者游戏）中的行为是否不同。通过劳动获得赠与时并不影响独裁者游戏中的行为。然而，完成枯燥任务的要求减少了那些不熟悉博弈论的参与者在公共物品游戏中的合作。已经有人努力测试从标准的、基于代币的合作游戏中得出的结论是否充分反映了“野外”的合作行为。然而，鉴于几乎完全依赖于这些游戏来研究合作，更多地探索这个问题将是受欢迎的。我们的数据并不是特别令人担忧，但它们确实表明，如果我们要从结构化经济游戏的结果中对人类行为做出一般性推断，那么还需要进一步探索。
