Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2003
In social dilemmas, expectations of reciprocity can lead to fully determined cooperation concurrent with the illusion of choice. The choice of the dominant alternative (i.e., defection) may be construed as being free and rational, but only at the cost of being incompatible with a behavioral science claiming to be deterministic.
1. In iterated PDGs, the assumption of determinism is more apparent than in one-shot games. Players’ choices are assumed to be controlled by the design of the game (i.e., the experimenters) and by each other's choices in preceding rounds (e.g., Rachlin 2002).