Prisoner's Dilemma

Description of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game (theory):

The Prisoner’s dilemma is such a game theory which many people use in their real life situation. Furthermore, in order to understand how this game works, let assume that we have two people and their names, for instance, are (Mr. Ralph & Ms. Lauren). Additionally, let assume that these two persons had committed a crime and the police have arrested them. However, it turns out that the police do not have lots of evidence about that crime. In the investigation, if Mr. Ralph stays silent and Ms. Lauren stays silent, they both stay in prison 1 year. However, if Ms. Ralph defects and betrays Ms. Lauren and Ms. Lauren stays silent, Mr. Ralph does not stay in prison and gets free while Ms. Lauren

According to economists, prisoner’s dilemma is a paradox due to the fact that individually rational behavior leads to collectively irrational results, for instance, you go free but you partner

In this case, economists claim that the best individual strategy is tit-to-tat, where you cooperate the first time and then do whatever the other person did the last time. As a result, the threat of retaliation makes us much less likely to be a jerk. Furthermore, over time, everyone does better if they cooperate but we should ask ourselves why? And why should I cooperate if the principle is sometimes counterintuitive to our survival? The reason behind this is that the social cooperation is intrinsically rewarding our brains. In one study, participants did the prisoner’s dilemma with an assumed human participant in an fMRI machine, when people cooperated in the dilemma, activation was seen in brain areas linked to reward processing. The researchers suggest this activation of the reward circuit may help to override the temptation that people get to not cooperate. Moreover, more brain imaging research found that when people cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma, it increases the firing frequency of dopamine neurons in the midbrain and they decreased in firing frequency when people did not cooperate and return the favor. These neural mechanism help us learn who is trustworthy reciprocating favors is and who is not. Furthermore, in 2013, German researchers found that prison inmates were actually more likely to cooperate with other prison inmates than university students were