Understanding and cooperation in social dilemmas

Cooperation in public dilemmas (and in externality dilemmas generally) is sometimes explained as a function of players' experience with the game: The more experience, the less cooperation. Experience, however, can produce both knowledge about how others will play the game (in particular, that they will defect) and improved understanding of the incentive structure of the game. We report data from two different experiments showing at best only a slight relationship between understanding the incentive structure of the game and cooperation. Inferences from the ‘experience’ finding that cooperation is based on misunderstanding of game incentives, therefore, seem misplaced.