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We don't want old people on our teams
John List again looks to field data:
This study examines data drawn from the game show Friend or Foe?, which is similar to the classic prisoner’s dilemma tale: partnerships are endogenously determined, players work together to earn money, after which, they play a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game over large stakes: varying from $200 to (potentially) more than $22,000. If one were to conduct such an experiment in the laboratory, the cost to gather the data would be well over $350,000. The data reveal several interesting insights; perhaps most provocatively, they suggest that even though the game is played in front of an audience of millions of viewers, there is some evidence consistent with a model of discrimination. The observed patterns of social discrimination are unanticipated, however. For example, there is evidence consistent with the notion that certain populations have a general “distaste” for older participants.
More specifically, players are less likely to select old people for their teams, even taking into account differences in expected returns from the differing strategies of the elderly. In general, whites, old people, and women cooperate more in the game. Mixed racial teams cooperate more than do all-white teams. Perhaps most surprisingly, even with these very high stakes, players cooperate far more than economic theory would predict. They cooperate about as much as they do in the games with lower stakes.
Here is the paper. Here is John's home page. Here is my previous post on John.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 22, 2006 at 06:42 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
If "Perhaps most surprisingly, even with these very high stakes, players cooperate far more than economic theory would predict," it must be time to revise the theory.
Posted by: EclectEcon at Mar 22, 2006 7:04:59 AM
"certain populations have a general “distaste” for older participants."
This is spot-on with my experience of looking for jobs as a 50-ish woman in a dot-com town. Flat refusals of consideration. Up-front. "You wouldn't want to work with a bunch of 25-year-olds!"
Posted by: who, me? at Mar 22, 2006 8:59:05 AM
You tend to see the same thing on "Survivor" (which show, by the by, I think has a paper or two buried in it itself.) From the first season on, there's been a clear bias against keeping on older folks. This isn't entirely surprising given the physical nature of much of the game, but you see it come into play even when the younger candidates for expulsion don't have any clear or apparent physical edge over the older ones.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Mar 22, 2006 9:29:31 AM
You tend to see the same thing on "Survivor" (which show, by the by, I think has a paper or two buried in it itself.) From the first season on, there's been a clear bias against keeping on older folks. This isn't entirely surprising given the physical nature of much of the game, but you see it come into play even when the younger candidates for expulsion don't have any clear or apparent physical edge over the older ones.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Mar 22, 2006 9:30:18 AM
You tend to see the same thing on "Survivor" (which show, by the by, I think has a paper or two buried in it itself.) From the first season on, there's been a clear bias against keeping on older folks. This isn't entirely surprising given the physical nature of much of the game, but you see it come into play even when the younger candidates for expulsion don't have any clear or apparent physical edge over the older ones.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Mar 22, 2006 9:30:35 AM
Eek. Apparently I had a bit of a "senior moment" there, myself.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Mar 22, 2006 9:49:18 AM
They found similar patterns on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. The old ones were consistently booted. In fact, at least in Britain, where the sense of Irony is developed to a supreme art form, the players actually started mentioning age as the reason they booted them ('I didnt like him, He's old'), for ratings effects.
Posted by: Darin London at Mar 22, 2006 11:32:01 AM
I think you mean The Weakest Link, where early dismissals of older players is certainly a detectable pattern on the American version as well. To my knowledge, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire doesn't have a cooperative component.
Posted by: R.J. Lehmann at Mar 22, 2006 11:11:14 PM
I think you mean The Weakest Link, where early dismissals of older players is certainly a detectable pattern on the American version as well. To my knowledge, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire doesn't have a cooperative component.
Posted by: R.J. Lehmann at Mar 22, 2006 11:12:03 PM
I found the following in a recent story titled "Why do people behave nicely?" (in the December 2005 issue of Discover):
http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-05/features/people-altruism/
[Quote] Many researchers have assumed that the logical choice [in a game of Prisoner's Dilemma] is betrayal, since your potential outcomes, depending on what the other prisoner does, are zero or three years—less time on average than the consequences of staying silent (one or five years). Yet when faced with this problem, most laypeople make the illogical choice to remain silent. Why?
The answer, [Joachim] Krueger [of Brown University] believes, is that they are employing social projection: They assume that the second prisoner will act the same way they will, and then they incorporate that assumption into the decision-making process. By that reasoning, the choice comes down to mutual betrayal (three years) or mutual cooperation (one year). Cooperation becomes the logical choice. [End Quote]
I don't know if it is time to revise the theory, but Krueger's theory appears to take into account people's preference for 'social projection', and thus explains some nice behaviors (such as cooperation in PD games).
Posted by: Abi at Mar 23, 2006 1:30:32 AM
Actually, I would expect an abnormally high level of cooperation. In addition to the stakes of the game, the players' friends, family and coworkers will be watching. Their reputations outside of the game are at stake as well.
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