Social interactions in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game: Implementation of a multinomial model for the analysis of cooperation and punishment behavior

• Applicant: Dr. Laura Mieth
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413280329

Cooperation is a central aspect of human societies. People use punishment to promote cooperative behaviour and establish or sustain a cooperative norm. Punishment is usually costly for the punished individual but also bears costs for the punisher. A classic experimental paradigm for investigating cooperative behaviour is the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game which can be combined with a punishment option. From an economic point of view costly punishment does not seem directly profitable. However, people even in one-trial interactions invest to costly punish other individuals. The multinomial Cooperation-Punishment-Model makes it possible to analyse and to interpret cooperation and punishment separately. Conditional on a parameter for cooperation four different types of punishment are parameterized. Moralistic, hypocritical, irrational and antisocial punishment are differentiated depending on the participants’ own behaviour and the partners’ behaviour (each can cooperate or defect) in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. The goal of the current project is to further extend the empirical basis and the theoretical range of the Cooperation-Punishment-Model and investigate research questions on cooperation and punishment from the point of view of the punishing individual.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Raoul Bell; Professor Dr. Axel Buchner