RIEB Discussion Paper Series No.2023-11

Title

The Concomitance of Prosociality and Social Networking Agency

Abstract

The awareness of individuals regarding their social network surroundings and their capacity to use social connections to their advantage are well-established human characteristics. Economic games, incorporated with network science, are frequently used to examine social behaviour. Traditionally, such game models and experiments artificially limit players' abilities to take varied actions toward distinct social neighbours (i.e., to operate their social networks). We designed an experimental paradigm that alters the degree of social network agency to interact with individual neighbours, and applied it to the prisoner's dilemma (N = 735), trust game (N = 735), and ultimatum game (N = 735) to investigate cooperation, trust, and fairness. The freedom to interact led to more prosocial behaviour across all three economic games and resulted in higher wealth and lower inequality compared to controls without such freedom. These findings suggest that human behaviour is more prosocial than current science indicates.

Keywords

Behavioural science; Networks; Cooperation; Prosociality

Inquiries

Danyang JIA
School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University
School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University

Ivan ROMIC
School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University
Center for Computational Social Science, Kobe University
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration, Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059

Lei SHI
School of Statistics and Mathematics, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics

Qi SU
Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China
Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Control and Management

Chen LIU
School of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Northwestern Polytechnical University

Jinzhuo LIU
School of Software, Yunnan University

Petter HOLME
Center for Computational Social Science, Kobe University
Department of Computer Science, Aalto University

Xuelong LI
School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University
School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University

Zhen WANG
School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University
School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University