A Cognitive/Affective Model of Strategic Behavior-2-Person Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game

John Q. Public, a computational model of political cognition that incorporates both cognitive and affective mechanisms and both on-line and memory-based processing, is employed to study strategic behaviors in a social dilemma situation. Specifically, two John Q. Publics were employed as players in a 2-person repeated prisoner’s dilemma game to simulate the experimental data from Rapoport et al. (1976). Compared to previous studies that simulated the same data, this study has two advantages: 1) it is arguably more psychologically realistic in that it incorporates an affective mechanism and 2) the players are modeled as completely independent agents.