New experiments challenge economic game assumptions

While traditional economic and evolutionary theory predicts that people will typically seek to maximise their own success, the results of economic games have shown people to be much more altruistic than expected. But a series of experiments carried out by evolutionary biologists at Oxford found that people are just as generous towards computers, which cannot benefit materially from cooperation, and that simply misunderstanding the game may lead to altruism in many cases. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ). Lead author Dr Max Burton-Chellew, of Oxford's Department of Zoology, said: 'Game theory can be used to predict how a self-interested and rational person will behave in social situations. However, economic games, in which people have to make decisions on how to allocate money to themselves and others, have consistently shown that these predictions fare poorly. In particular, it seems that people are overly generous and altruistic, and appear to be primarily motivated by concerns of fairness rather than maximising income. As a result, various theories of "social preferences" have since been developed to explain the results.' The idea behind these 'social dilemma' games is that because they involve making genuinely costly decisions - for example, giving up money (albeit money handed out by the experimenter) - they reveal what people really want and care about, or 'prefer'.