Priming dilemmas’prisioners: an enquiry into agents’ minds

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Bernardo Fortuna Rebelo e
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/105449
• topic: Behavioral-economics; Priming; Prisoner’s dilemma; Rationality; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

This work tries to understand how an exposure to economic logic and the current definition of rationality influences behavior. I usea randomized scrambled-sentencetestthat primes different groups either with economic or moral oriented key-words;then follows a set of ethicalgames, mainlyvariations of the Prisoner’s dilemma. In both an experimental setting (117economics/business graduates) and online survey (113 subjects), I do not findevidence that this short-term, conceptual priminghas an impact on agents’ decisions regarding this sort of dilemmas.This might be due to the ineffectiveness of the priming, or due to its subtle nature that only bigger datasets can uncover. However, it is found evidencein the online surveycorroborating the literature stance that having had an economics background alters behaviortowards defection. The evidence also highlights a particularly robust find in the literature: cooperation rates are far higher than expected by the self-interest model. These findings then open a more in depth discussion about thevery concept of rationality and theepistemological pathwithin economics.