Empathy in One-Shot Prisoner Dilemma

Abstract: Strategic decision making involves affective and cognitive functions like reasoning, cognitive and emotional empathy which may be subject to age and gender differences. However, empathy-related changes in strategic decision-making and their relation to age, gender and neuropsychological functions have not been studied widely. In this article, we study a one-shot prisoner dilemma from a psychological game theory viewpoint. Forty seven participants (28 women and 19 men), aged 18 to 42 years, were tested with a empathy questionnaire and a one-shot prisoner dilemma questionnaire comprising a closiness option with the other participant. The percentage of cooperation and defection decisions was analyzed. A new empathetic payoff model was calculated to fit the observations from the test whether multi-dimensional empathy levels matter in the outcome. A significant level of cooperation is observed in the experimental one-shot game. The collected data suggests that perspective taking, empathic concern and fantasy scale are strongly correlated and have an important effect on cooperative decisions. However, their effect in the payoff is not additive. Mixed scales as well as other non-classified subscales (25+8 out of 47) were observed from the data.