Cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma Game: Influence of Players' Social Roles

The paper aims to extend the findings of a previous study (Grinberg et al., 2012) exploring the impact of social relations on the cooperation in the Prisoner’s dilemma game. Relations between players are manipulated by assigning different roles. The roles embodied the four basic types of human relations in line with Fiske’s relational models theory (Fiske, 1991): communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing (players are assigned roles of team mates, chief and subordinate, partners, and opponents, respectively). Cooperation rates, mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and payoffs gained were subsequently analyzed and compared for a series of forty games. As a result we identified that the market-pricing condition is characterized by considerably lower individual and mutual cooperation, higher mutual defection and lower payoff in comparison to the conditions impersonating the remaining three relational types.