Selfishness

I just did a game on-line through Amazon Mechanical Turk that involved a form of economics. Basically, each person started out with 100 points, and at the beginning of each turn , you were asked if you would pay 10 points per person to give the other people in the round 60 points, and they were asked the same. The bonus was that you got an extra penny for each 10 points when the game was over.

Now I went into the game deciding that I would always choose to give the 10 points per person (which usually amounted to 60 points altogether), because I was hoping that being nice would encourage them to be nice. The problem was, people weren't doing the same.

The game didn't say that only so many people could get bonuses, and it said you could get up to 3 dollars extra. I doubt if many people got that many though, because hardly anyone was willing to "sacrifice" their points. It got to the point that in the last round I had to say no because if I had said yes, and no one else had (which had happened the previous 3 rounds) I wouldn't have had enough points to continue, (and I didn't know it was the last round).

It may have been easier to make it work if I had been with the same 6 people the whole time, but they kept shifting it around. And too many people were being selfish and, to put it bluntly, STUPID!

Too harsh? Look at it this way: in a single round, if everyone had been willing to share points, they would have all lost 60 points, true, but they would have all gained. . . what? Let's see, what's 60 times 6? 360 points! It would have only taken 10 rounds for everyone to have maxed out the possible bonus points! As it is, I think the most anyone got was maybe 1200 points, unless there were some rounds that were more generous than what I saw.

Why are people so selfish? Why aren't they willing to sacrifice a little to gain more? Of course there was no communication involved, so we couldn't make bargains or whatever, but if everyone had started out on the first round giving up the 60 points, started out on the assumption that everyone would be nice, then everyone would have won! As it was, no one really did. Those who did sacrifice at the beginning weren't willing to continue, and I can't really blame them, I probably shouldn't have stayed nice for so long.

Now this is just a silly game online, and the stakes weren't very high. But what are the chances that anything would be any different in a more high stakes situation?