What Is the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
The prisoner's dilemma is a game used by researchers to model and investigate how people decide to cooperate—or not.
Imagine that Prisoner A and Prisoner B are charged with a crime and detained separately, and each has the chance to give a confession. Neither prisoner knows what the other will choose to do. There are several possible outcomes:
Should Prisoner A keep quiet, or betray Prisoner B by admitting to the crime? This is the classic version of the prisoner's dilemma.
Many other versions of the dilemma have been created, including ones in which each participant stands to gain more or less depending on their decisions, as well as other set-ups in which multiple games are played sequentially. The structure of the prisoner's dilemma was described by mathematicians in the 1950s and has since been used as a model for real-world situations and applied in domains such as psychology, economics, and political theory.
How Is the Prisoner's Dilemma Used?
The prisoner's dilemma, like other games used by researchers, can illuminate how people make decisions about cooperation and betrayal under different conditions.
In the classic version of the dilemma, the "rational" choice, given all the possible outcomes, is to betray the other player. But adding additional rounds of the game—and thus the potential for retaliation by one who is betrayed—can change the equation.
Psychologists continue to use the prisoner's dilemma (and similar games) to explore dynamics such as how memory affects adaptive decision-making and whether intuitive thinking boosts cooperation.
Thinking about the prisoner’s dilemma and the characters’ competing interests can be a helpful analogy when considering the relationship between the present self and the future self. In the case of addiction , for example, having a cigarette or a drink is in the interest of the present self but not the future self; people who choose abstinence may do so because it maintains the credibility of their sobriety and builds trust between the present and the future self.
Explore More About Prisoner's Dilemma
For a comprehensive understanding of prisoner's dilemma, read our complete guide: