Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 816-8580, Japan.
School of Statistics and Mathematics, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming 650221, China.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Dec 3;121(49):e2412195121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2412195121. Epub 2024 Nov 27.
Stylized experiments, the public goods game and its variants thereof, have taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to cooperate (or contribute to shared resources) more than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing explanations for this phenomenon: Either cooperating is an innate human trait (the prosocial preference hypothesis) or a transitory effect while learning the game (the confused learner hypothesis). We use large-scale experimental data in the two-player version of the public goods game-the prisoner's dilemma-from an experimental design to distinguish between these two hypotheses. By monitoring the effects of zealots (persistently cooperating bots) and varying the participants' awareness of them, we find a considerably more complex scenario than previously reported. People indeed have a prosocial bias, but not to the degree that they always forego taking action to increase their profit. While our findings end the simplistic theorizing of prosociality, an observed positive, cooperative response to zealots has actionable policy implications.
理想化实验、公共物品博弈及其变体，已经向我们反复证明了一个奇特的、可重现的事实，即人类的合作倾向（或对共有资源的贡献）比从经济理性假设中所预期的要高。对于这种现象有两种相互竞争的解释：合作是人类的一种先天特质（亲社会偏好假设），还是在学习博弈时的一种短暂效应（困惑学习者假设）。我们使用了来自实验设计的大规模实验数据，在两人版公共物品博弈——囚徒困境中——来区分这两种假设。通过监测狂热者（始终合作的机器人）的影响并改变参与者对他们的认知，我们发现了一个比之前报道的更为复杂的情况。人们确实有一种亲社会的偏见，但并没有到总是放弃采取行动来增加自己利益的程度。虽然我们的研究结果结束了对亲社会行为的简单理论化，但对狂热者的观察到的积极、合作的反应具有可操作的政策意义。
