Tuesday Seminar – 26 November, 2019

Tuesday November 26, 2019: Jordan Mansell (UQAM) and Michael Bang Petersen (Aarhus University). “Cooperation and Defection in an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma: Do Liberals and Conservatives Display Differences in Social Cognition?”. Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, Université de Montréal, C-4145, 12h-13h.

Abstract: In its most simple form, the research question that we want to answer is: Do individuals with different political values differ in their general social-cognitive strategies? Research into ideological differences links liberal and conservative ideological positions to variation in cognition and decision-making in response to environmental stimuli including risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty. We apply an evolutionary framework and investigate whether the differences in cognition and decision-making observed in liberals and conservatives reflect alternative adaptive strategies for social interactions? We recruit a sample of (N=450) liberals and conservatives to participate in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Using a multi-wave approach to data collection we obtain a sample of liberals and conservatives which is matched on age, education, income, and strength of ideological orientation. We hypothesize that both ideological groups will converge to cooperative behaviour however, cooperation in conservative participants will be more sensitive to social defections. On multiple measures of ideological orientation, we find strong evidence liberals and conservatives significantly differ in their: (1) initial willingness to cooperate; (2) overall cooperation; and, (3) forgiveness of a social defection. We implement our study online in real-time using the OTree tool for experimental research on a Heroku server.  

This content has been updated on 29 November 2019 at 19 h 30 min.