Smart people cooperate

What happens when you ask two people to play the famous prisoner’s dilemma game? In theory, if people are smart and rational, both participants would keep their mouths shut and walk away free.

What happens, if you ask people to play the same prisoner’s dilemma game repeatedly with each other? It’s a bit like playing poker. If you play with another person for a while, you learn their habits and strategy and if you are smart, you adjust your behaviour in such a way as to maximise your payoff.

What happens if two people with different IQs are asked to play the prisoner’s dilemma game repeatedly? According to Salvatore Nunnari and his colleagues, smarter people learn faster and tend to make better decisions.

They asked 701 UK citizens to participate in a series of games. They first asked the volunteers to fill out a cognitive ability test (i.e. an IQ test) and then play the prisoner’s dilemma game with another person five times before playing a harmony game. The harmony game had the same set-up as the prisoner’s dilemma game, but the payoffs are manipulated in such a way that cooperating with the other person leads to the highest payoff.

Based on the results of the IQ test, they split the volunteers into five groups by IQ. For reference, a standard IQ test is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100 with a standard deviation of 15 points; an IQ of 119 or higher puts you in the top 20% of the population. If you have never done a professional IQ test (not the ones you find on the internet or in magazines) I recommend it: They are fun and tell you a lot about yourself.

In any case, the first result in these experiments was that people in the top 20% by IQ learned to adjust their behaviour faster by both observing their opponent’s behaviour and their own decisions. The result was that their results in terms of monetary payoff tended to be better than the results of people with lower IQs.

In another version of this game, the volunteers were given some information about the cognitive skills of their opponent. They were also given a choice between continuing to play the prisoner’s dilemma game or switching to the harmony game that favours cooperation.

People in the top 20% by IQ were much more likely to switch from the prisoner’s dilemma game to the harmony game, but only if they were facing an opponent who they believed was high IQ. With lower IQ opponents, they were no more likely to switch to a cooperative game than the rest of the participants. Meanwhile, volunteers at the lower end of the spectrum were generally less likely to choose cooperation and more likely to continue playing the prisoner’s dilemma game – often to their detriment.

Finally, they asked people to think about immigration and minimum wage policies in the UK and write down the real-world consequences of these policies. People with higher cognitive skills tended to come up not just with the direct consequences of higher immigration or higher minimum wages but with more indirect consequences, which in turn enabled them to make more informed choices and in general choose more cooperative policies rather than policies that are driven by an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Please don’t send me hate mail if you are for or against higher immigration or minimum wages, I am simply telling you what happened in the experiment.

Overall, the results of these experiments all pointed to the same thing. Smart people cooperate, and dumb people compete. And feel free to send me hate mail about this statement because I truly believe that outside of sports, cooperation is almost always the better solution than trying to outcompete an opponent. In particular, I believe that in high stakes matters in the real world (and no, sports are not high stakes), cooperation is almost always the best solution.

This is why I follow the tit-for-tat strategy with initial cooperation whenever I meet other people for the first time. In essence, whenever you meet someone for the first time, your default position is to cooperate. If the other person cooperates, you continue to cooperate. If the other person does not cooperate, you stop cooperating and start competing. You remain in the previous mode until the other person changes their behaviour in which case you mimic whatever behaviour the other person chose. It can be shown that in repeated games with another person, this is the strategy that will maximise your payout, so ironically, conditionally cooperating with other people is a selfish decision to get the best result for yourself with the least grief and stress.