Findings could help to support greater cooperation to tackle global challenges
Our ability to cooperate with others may be influenced by how our attention is captured and directed, as much as by how altruistic we are feeling.
According to a new study by researchers at the University of Birmingham jointly with the University of Zurich, choices made for individual reward or cooperatively for a joint reward can be influenced by presenting information to participants in configurations that naturally draw their attention. The results are published today in Communications Psychology.
Cooperation – defined as the ability of individuals to incur a personal cost for the benefit of a group – is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour. Understanding how we can foster cooperation is essential for tackling many global challenges, from climate change to the spread of infectious diseases – and understanding what motivates people to cooperate is key to this process.
[The study] gives us some valuable insights into how we can better understand, predict and perhaps manipulate people’s behaviour to improve cooperation between individuals and groups.
Dr Arkady Konovalov from the University of Birmingham and lead researcher said:
“We found we were able to drive people to be a bit more cooperative simply through presenting particular information in areas of the screen where we knew they were directing their attention. While this was purely a laboratory-based experiment, it gives us some valuable insights into how we can better understand, predict and perhaps manipulate people’s behaviour to improve cooperation between individuals and groups.”
In their experiment, the researchers used a well-established interactive experiment, based on game theory, called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They invited 88 participants, a mixture of men and women aged between 18 and 35 years old. The participants took part in a series of laboratory ‘games’ in which they were invited to make decisions about cooperating for mutual benefit for them and a partner or acting alone for individual benefit. Different levels of reward were given for different decisions made.
While the individual benefit might appear to be higher than the cooperation benefit, if both sides cooperate, the reward is higher still.
The choices available in each round of the game along with the rewards were visible to participants on a computer display. The researchers used eye-tracking technology to understand how people were reading and processing this information in each round of the experiment. By manipulating where on the screen the choices were presented, the researchers found it was possible to influence the choices that people made.
The team showed that when participants paid attention to the payoffs of others in the experiment, there was increased likelihood that they would make cooperative choices. When they paid attention more to their own reward, they were more likely to make a selfish choice.
By placing information about the payoffs of other participants in areas of the screen where they were likely to be given most attention, the researchers found they were able to influence cooperation rates among participants.
Surprisingly, although participants followed a natural screen-reading pattern of looking at the top left of the screen first, before reading information lower down, the researchers found that cooperation was higher when the ‘cooperation information’ was placed at the bottom of the screen.
Associate Professor
Arkady Konovalov is a neuroeconomist interested in studying individual and social decision making using models of the choice process and value-based learning at the University of Birmingham.
