Teaching Children Cooperation --- an Application of Experimental Game Theory

This paper studies children's behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game. I attempted to teach children cooperation by means of a short moral lecture. Over the period of 12 months, I experimented with 196 children between the ages of six and eleven. The experimental findings are as follows. (1) In support of the developmental psychology theories, the proportions of cooperation are indeed higher for older children. (2) There is a positive short-run teaching effect: the proportion of cooperative individual increases significantly immediately after the lecture. However, a moral lecture 12 months before has no significant effect on children's behavior