Abstract
Cooperation and competition are a fundamental part of human interaction. In each situation, different people will cooperate or compete with one another in different ways. In this paper, we study the relationship between how people feel about the person they are interacting with (the affective identity of that person) and their level of cooperation in different circumstances. Standard game-theoretic models provide solutions to what self-interested rational agents would do in various situations. However, humans don't respond rationally in many situations, and the decision to cooperate can be strongly influenced by the identities of the interactants. In this study, over 1,000 participants answered a survey about whether they would cooperate in various framings of the Prisoners Dilemma (PD). These framings are based on the shared cultural sentiments in a three dimensional emotion space (Evaluation, Potency and Activity or EPA) about identities measured in existing large scale surveys. We combined 27 such identities with a set of five different payoff matrices, and provide statistical correlates between the sentiments about identities and likelihood of cooperation. We show that the evaluative (E) dimension is a strong predictor of cooperation, and we discuss the other factors including mixing terms. Our results provide a novel alternative view of cooperation in PD as arising simply from culturally shared sentiments about identities, rather than from payoff estimates.