Reinforcement Learning Explains Conditional Cooperation and Its Moody Cousin.

ABSTRACT: Direct reciprocity, or repeated interaction, is a main mechanism to sustain cooperation under social dilemmas involving two individuals. For larger groups and networks, which are probably more relevant to understanding and engineering our society, experiments employing repeated multiplayer social dilemma games have suggested that humans often show conditional cooperation behavior and its moody variant. Mechanisms underlying these behaviors largely remain unclear. Here we provide a proximate account for this behavior by showing that individuals adopting a type of reinforcement learning, called aspiration learning, phenomenologically behave as conditional cooperator. By definition, individuals are satisfied if and only if the obtained payoff is larger than a fixed aspiration level. They rein

SUBMITTER: Ezaki T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4954710 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature