'NICE GUYS DON'T ALWAYS FINISH LAST', ACCORDING TO ECONOMIC EXPERIMENTS
Suppose someone were to forgo a personal gain in order to help you out. Would you return the favour? And if you were to act first, could you trust the other person to reciprocate? To investigate the circumstances under which people do reciprocate, new economic research has confronted people with this type of dilemma in controlled laboratory experiments where they earn money depending on their decisions. As economists would predict, most people - 70% - behaved selfishly. But a substantial minority didn't - and they ended up with higher earnings than the selfish people.
The economic experiments were conducted by researchers Kenneth Clark and Martin Sefton using 240 volunteer subjects - students enrolled at the University of Manchester and Penn State University in the United States. The results are published in the latest issue of the Economic Journal.
The experiments were based on the idea of the 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in which two prisoners are held in separate cells and can decide whether to confess or stay silent. Each prisoner has a private incentive to confess, but each would be better off if they both stayed silent. The Prisoner's Dilemma has been widely used by economists and other social scientists as representative of situations where individual and collective interests diverge. More recently, Channel Four's Trust Me series, hosted by Nick Bateman, has used a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma as the basis for a game show.