The restart effect in social dilemmas shows humans are self-interested not altruistic

Abstract

Do economic games show evidence of altruistic or self-interested motivations in humans? A huge body of empirical work has found contrasting results. While many participants routinely make costly decisions that benefit strangers, consistent with the hypothesis that humans exhibit a biologically novel form of altruism (or “prosociality”), many participants also typically learn to pay fewer costs with experience, consistent with self-interested individuals adapting to an unfamiliar environment. Key to resolving this debate is explaining the famous “restart effect,” a puzzling enigma whereby failing cooperation in public goods games can be briefly rescued by a surprise restart. Here we replicate this canonical result, often taken as evidence of uniquely human altruism, and show that it 1) disappears when cooperation is invisible, meaning individuals can no longer affect the behavior of their groupmates, consistent with strategically motivated, self-interested, cooperation; and 2) still occurs even when individuals are knowingly grouped with computer players programmed to replicate human decisions, consistent with confusion. These results show that the restart effect can be explained by a mixture of self-interest and irrational beliefs about the game’s payoffs, and not altruism. Consequently, our results suggest that public goods games have often been measuring self-interested but confused behaviors and reject the idea that conventional theories of evolution cannot explain the results of economic games.

The restart effect in social dilemmas shows humans are self-interested not altruistic

“…1) You are in a group with computers 2) You are in a group with humans 3) People in your group will see your decision / the average group decision 4) You will know the decisions of people in your group / the average group decision 5) You will see your earnings after each round Data, Materials, and Software Availability.. All the data, analysis, and experiment files are freely available online at the Open Science Framework (https://osf. io/8nxbz/?view_only=7cfd4e1d26f14fa7ab07e96b2adccbb9) (70).…”