Will Cooperators Manage to Cooperate? - Experimental Evidence

It is often claimed that, if one could sense whether the other is going to cooperate or not, cooperators will manage to cooperate. Our experiment tries to shed new light on this debate. Participants could make their strategies in an asymmetric prisoner's dilemma game and a trust game dependent on their partners' individual donation shares to a self-selected charity and on whether their partner belongs to a group with high or low average donations (group affiliation). On average, a high donation share triggered a noncooperative response more often. This result was, however, observable only in the trust game. Participants were found not to condition their choices on group affiliation.