Abstract:

Even though the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a widely studied model for social interactions, not much research has been done to determine how it can be correlated with something else. The focus in this paper will be to answer the question: To what extent do the characteristics of a high schooler’s strategy in an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament align with their views about classroom cooperation? In this study, high school students were asked to create a strategy for the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and answer questions about their views on classroom cooperation. The strategies were quantified using a study that determined the main characteristics of each strategy, and the Cooperative Classroom Environment Measure (CCEM) was used to determine cooperative mindset. Although the sample size was severely limited, the results suggest a strong relationship between a strategy’s level of niceness and forgiveness and the student’s overall score on the CCEM. For this study, the important takeaways were about the process of being able to relate a hard-to-measure quality like cooperation to a mathematical model.