Locus of control and learning to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma game

Abstract

Boone et al. (Boone, C., De Brabander, B., & van Witteloostuijn, A. (1999a). Locus of control and strategic behaviour in a prisoner's dilemma game. Personality and Individual Differences, 27, 695-706;Boone, C., De Brabander, B., & van Witteloostuijn, A. (1999b). The impact of personality on behaviour in five Prisoner's Dilemma games, Journal of Economic Psychology, 20, showed that subjects with an internal locus of control were, on average, more cooperative in a prisoner's dilemma (PD) game than subjects with an external locus of control. They conjectured that this finding should not be interpreted as evidence for stable differences in cooperative behaviour between internals and externals. Specifically, they suggested that it is the capacity to adapt to different circumstances over time that distinguishes internals from externals. In the present study we want to investigate the validity of this proposition. We argue that in a PD setting individuals gradually learn to understand the subtle interplay between cooperation and selfinterest. Repetition and learning breed cooperation because people learn to understand that cooperation is instrumental in obtaining long-run profit. There is, however, good reason to believe that individuals differ as to the speed of learning to cooperate. We hypothesise that internals are more astute in learning to cooperate in a PD game because they are more endowed with the cognitive faculties necessary for quick learning than externals. Our empirical findings indeed reveal that externals play less cooperatively, on average, in the first part of a series of PD games. However, this difference gradually disappears. In fact, the experiment suggests that learning and repetition reduce the impact of individual differences. By way of appraisal, implications for further research are discussed. #

Cognitive Ability, Character Skills, and Learning to Play Equilibrium: A Level-kAnalysis

“…10 To the extent that success in markets and other settings depends on the capacity to learn to use a combination of analytic reasoning skills and the ability to understand well others' patterns of thinking and behavior, our findings may shed light on the underlying processes that explain why cognition and character matter and how they interact. Settings in which successful decision-makers need to learn to combine analytic skills and a good theory of mind include sequences of market entry, exit not focus on how character skills influence learning to play equilibrium, although Boone et al (2002) find that sufficient repetition allows subjects with an external locus of control to become more cooperative in the prisoner's dilemma.…”

Team Locus-of-Control Composition, Leadership Structure, Information Acquisition, and Financial Performance: A Business Simulation Study

“…CEOs with a high internal locus of control, for instance, are more inclined to pursue innovative and risky strategies than their counterparts with an external locus of control (Miller, Kets de Vries, & Toulouse, 1982), even when they operate in the same market environment (Boone et al, 1996). In a Prisoner's Dilemma context, externals are less inclined to play cooperatively than internals (Boone, De Brabander, & van Witteloostuijn, 1999), and they learn payoff-maximizing behavior more slowly (Boone, De Brabander, Carree, de Jong, van Olffen, & van Witteloostuijn, 2002). These fundamental differences between internals and externals are likely to cause communication barriers and hamper team integration when internals and externals have to work together.…”

Cultural Accommodation and Language Priming

“…experiments in the past have studied the impact of both situational (e.g., behavior of the other actors) and dispositional (e.g., personality characteristics or cultural background) determinants of cooperation. For instance, cooperative behavior has been shown to be related to personality characteristics such as locus of control (lester 1992;Boone et al 1999b), demographic characteristics such as gender (cook and sloane 1985;Frank et al 1993;Mason et al 1991), and cooperative versus competitive behavior of the other actor in previous rounds of the game (cox et al 1991). several studies have also investigated the impact of ethnical cultural background on cooperative behavior (cook and chi 1984; cox et al 1991), and found that anglo-americans are more competitively oriented than african and asian americans.…”