Pulford Briony D, Krockow Eva M, Colman Andrew M, Lawrence Catherine L
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Wales, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2016 Mar 24;11(3):e0152352. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152352. eCollection 2016.
The Centipede game provides a dynamic model of cooperation and competition in repeated dyadic interactions. Two experiments investigated psychological factors driving cooperation in 20 rounds of a Centipede game with significant monetary incentives and anonymous and random re-pairing of players after every round. The main purpose of the research was to determine whether the pattern of strategic choices observed when no specific social value orientation is experimentally induced--the standard condition in all previous investigations of behavior in the Centipede and most other experimental games--is essentially individualistic, the orthodox game-theoretic assumption being that players are individualistically motivated in the absence of any specific motivational induction. Participants in whom no specific state social value orientation was induced exhibited moderately non-cooperative play that differed significantly from the pattern found when an individualistic orientation was induced. In both experiments, the neutral treatment condition, in which no orientation was induced, elicited competitive behavior resembling behavior in the condition in which a competitive orientation was explicitly induced. Trait social value orientation, measured with a questionnaire, influenced cooperation differently depending on the experimentally induced state social value orientation. Cooperative trait social value orientation was a significant predictor of cooperation and, to a lesser degree, experimentally induced competitive orientation was a significant predictor of non-cooperation. The experimental results imply that the standard assumption of individualistic motivation in experimental games may not be valid, and that the results of such investigations need to take into account the possibility that players are competitively motivated.
蜈蚣博弈提供了一个在重复二元互动中合作与竞争的动态模型。两项实验研究了在有显著金钱激励且每轮玩家匿名随机重新配对的20轮蜈蚣博弈中驱动合作的心理因素。该研究的主要目的是确定，在没有实验性诱导特定社会价值取向时所观察到的战略选择模式——这是之前所有蜈蚣博弈及大多数其他实验性博弈行为研究中的标准条件——是否本质上是个人主义的，正统博弈论假设是在没有任何特定动机诱导的情况下玩家受个人主义动机驱使。未被诱导出特定国家社会价值取向的参与者表现出适度的非合作行为，这与诱导出个人主义取向时发现的模式有显著差异。在两项实验中，未诱导任何取向的中性处理条件引发了类似于明确诱导出竞争取向时的竞争行为。通过问卷测量的特质社会价值取向，根据实验性诱导的状态社会价值取向不同地影响合作。合作特质社会价值取向是合作的显著预测指标，而在较小程度上，实验性诱导的竞争取向是非合作的显著预测指标。实验结果表明，实验性博弈中个人主义动机的标准假设可能无效，并且此类研究结果需要考虑玩家受竞争动机驱使的可能性。
