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Karma works
Thursday, 24 January 2002
It seems that karma really does exist. A new study has shown that acting selflessly has rewards, even from those you haven't helped.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Germany staged a series of complex computerised social games with 114 students. Their results appear in this week's Nature.
Manfred Milinski and colleagues had the students play two types of games, both using money as an incentive. Each game had six players who were kept anonymous by using pseudonyms. The history of each game was on screen so that the players could see what everyone else was doing, but there was no risk of identification after the game (or when they collected their cash).
The central issue in such games is how to sustain a public resource — the 'tragedy of the commons'. Without controls, individuals tend to use more than their share of the resource, destroying it for everyone. A common way of dealing with this is to punish the greedy people, which acts as an incentive for others to behave.
An example is the recent unsuccessful attempts to turn public transport systems in Melbourne and Perth into 'honesty' systems. People stopped buying tickets knowing they wouldn't be caught, resulting in the need to employ more and more inspectors to police the system.
The authors of the German study suggest positive reinforcement as an alternative. If people can see others performing good acts then they are more likely to behave in a publicly beneficial way.
The first game looked at the 'public good' and required the six players to decide if they were going to contribute some money to the public purse. The donated money was pooled, doubled and split by six, regardless of how many people contributed. Not surprisingly, after a few games, no-one contributed, preferring to hold onto their own cash.
The second game was more complex. Called the 'indirect reciprocity game', the players were allocated potential donor or receiver status for each game, playing each role at least once, and donors were asked if they would give to a receiver. There was no direct reciprocity — if you gave to someone, they would not be giving back. Nevertheless, players who helped others were given support later, based on their 'reputation'.
By mixing up the order of the games, the researchers could watch how expectations affected behaviour. Contributions in the public good game fell dramatically if it was played several times in a row. But when it was alternated with the indirect reciprocity game, contributions maintained a high level.
This is because players could see the history of all the other players. If a player hadn't contributed to the public purse, they were unlikely to benefit when the indirect reciprocity game was played.
So the next time you think about underpaying your share of a restaurant bill, throwing your rubbish out the car window, or using someone else's milk in the office fridge, remember — what goes around comes around.
ABC Science Online
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