We experimentally examine how the incentive to defect in a social dilemma affects conditional cooperation. In our first study we conduct online experiments in which subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma games with payoffs systematically varied across games. We find that few second...

Mentalising is assumed to be involved in decision-making that is necessary to social interaction. We investigated the relationship between mentalising and two types of strategic games - those involving the choice to cooperate with another for joint gain or compete for own gain and those...

Cooperation is beneficial but may be hard to achieve in situations where the selfish interests of individuals conflict with their common goal, such as in sharing of goods, help, knowledge or information, in trade and pollution negotiations, and in exploitation of common resources. The standard...

An effective way to foster cooperation is to monitor behaviour and sanction freeriding. Yet, previous studies have shown that cooperation quickly declines when sanctioning mechanisms are removed. We test if explicitly expressing trust in players' capability to maintain cooperation after the...