MRI Study Shows We're Wired to Cooperate

ibi writes "The NYT reports that humans apparently have an inborne bias towards cooperation. People who cooperated during standard Prisoner's Dilemma tests registered high levels of activity in the pleasure centers of their brains. This result was the opposite of what the researchers were expecting. (But I bet they were testing students rather than their advisers :-)"

Comments

stupid researchers

[tps12]

Why is this the opposite of what the researchers were expecting? Game theory was not invented by evil capitalists, it was developed to describe observed situations and quantify rational decisions. It is trivial to demonstrate that cooperation (or "tit for tat") is the winningest strategy in an infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. It should come as no surprise that humans have evolved to choose the winning strategy in such situations.

Another Prisoner's Dilemma: if a moderator mods me down, and I am insightful, then we both lose (me right now, and the mod in metamoderation). But if he mods me down and I am trolling, then he wins and I lose. And if he mods me up and I am trolling, then I win and he loses. However, if he mods me up and I am insightful, then we break even again.

So which is it, punk?