Two suspects (A and B) were arrested by the police after committing the crime and were interrogated in isolation; The policy of the police is "be lenient in confession and strict in resistance". If both of them confess, they will be sentenced to eight years each; One person confesses, the other person does not confess, and is released and sentenced to 10 year; If you don't confess, the evidence is insufficient 1 year.
A classic case of prisoner's dilemma:
We know that in the game of prisoner's dilemma, if the participants can cooperate with each other, there will be a better ending, but they don't believe each other will cooperate. Game theory predicts that both sides will not risk their own losses to cooperate, so they will choose not to cooperate. However, a large number of experimental studies show that people actually cooperate more times than predicted by theory.
For the above situation, change the conditions: tell half the participants that they play community games, and tell the other half that they play Wall Street games. Otherwise, the two groups are exactly the same. As a result, in the social game group, 70% people cooperated with each other from the beginning, and they have been like this all the time during the experiment. In the wall street game group, the proportion is just the opposite: 70% people don't cooperate, 30% people cooperate at first, but when others don't pay much attention, they give up.
This modified game shows that many people will be influenced by the environment, and even the name of the game will affect people's decisions. If participants think that the game is a community game, they will tend to cooperate, and if their game is to measure competition, they will tend not to cooperate.