Chapter 48 Prompting Strategic Reasoning Increases Other-regarding Behavior

The current cultural norms with regard to sharing, cooperation, trust, and punishment are the result of 23 million years of evolution and adaptation. During most of those 23 million years, humans lived in small interactive groups and developed behaviors and strategies to promote cooperation and social exchange within the group. Within such groups, humans were expected to share with one another and to cooperate to advance the group. This is clear in contemporary studies of extant huntergatherer societies. Today, experimental subjects bring many of the same behaviors and strategies to the laboratories. This results in far more cooperative and sharing behavior in first-time decisions than standard game theory would predict. Prompting not only does not help; it makes the results once again like what are observe in the random/divide treatment, the treatment that started so many psychologists and economists wondering about the standard economics rationality assumption.