A team of scientists from the universities of Barcelona, Carlos III de Madrid and Zaragoza (Spain) has carried out a study to find out how the cooperative attitude of people evolves according to their age .
To do this, they conducted an experiment with 168 randomly chosen people between the ages of 10 and 87 , who were presented to their participants as a game through a web interface; specifically a virtual version of the prisoner’s dilemma. During 25 consecutive rounds they had to choose between cooperating or not cooperating with their groupmates, with different rewards according to each action. The experiment was carried out within the framework of the Barcelona Lab platform promoted by the Directorate of Creativity and Innovation of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB) and was subsequently repeated to contrast results.
The experiment shows that young people between 10 and 16 years of age have a more fickle behavior when cooperating than the rest of the age groups and that those over 66 years of age are those who show a greater inclination to cooperate.
“These results invite us to think that there is an evolutionary and cultural component throughout the life cycle and that being more inclined to cooperate is a quality that can be learned, ” says Carlos Gracia-Lázaro, co-author of the study.
“In general, when collaborating, people take into account what others have done, which is known as conditional cooperation , but our experiments show that adults also consider their own past actions; in other words, their way of acting is more predictable and helps a little to maintain cooperation, ”says Yamir Moreno, co-author of the study.
The results of the study have been published in the journal Nature Communications .
