Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 12, 2025

The Collective Trust Game: An Online Group Adaptation of the Trust Game Based on the HoneyComb Paradigm
Published on: October 20, 2022
The stability of conditional cooperation: beliefs alone cannot explain the decline of cooperation in social dilemmas
Luciano Andreozzi1, Matteo Ploner1, Ali Seyhun Saral2
1Department of Economics, University of Trento, 38122, Trento, Italy.
Abstract:
An often-replicated result in the experimental literature on social dilemmas is that a large share of subjects choose conditionally cooperative strategies. Cooperation generated by such choices is notoriously unstable, as individuals reduce their contributions to the public good in reaction to other subjects' free-riding. This has led to the widely-held conclusion that cooperation observed in experiments (and its decline) is mostly driven by imperfect reciprocity. In this study, we explore the possibility that the type of reciprocally cooperative choices observed in experiments may themselves evolve over time. We do so by observing the evolution of subjects' choices in an anonymously repeated social dilemma. Our results show that a significant fraction of reciprocally cooperative subjects become unconditional defectors in the course of the experiment, while the reverse is rarely observed.
More Related Videos
11:13The Social Dimension of Stress: Experimental Manipulations of Social Support and Social Identity in the Trier Social Stress Test
Published on: November 19, 2015
06:42Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation of the Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex to Experimentally Reduce Ideological Threat Responses
Published on: September 28, 2018
Related Concept Videos
Relationship Formation
Social Proof
Causes of Social Behavior II: Cognitive Processes
Social Facilitation
Social Exchange Theory
Social Exchange Theory