John List again looks to field data:
This study examines data drawn from the game show Friend or Foe?, which is similar to the classic prisoner’s dilemma tale: partnerships are endogenously determined, players work together to earn money, after which, they play a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game over large stakes: varying from $200 to (potentially) more than $22,000. If one were to conduct such an experiment in the laboratory, the cost to gather the data would be well over $350,000. The data reveal several interesting insights; perhaps most provocatively, they suggest that even though the game is played in front of an audience of millions of viewers, there is some evidence consistent with a model of discrimination. The observed patterns of social discrimination are unanticipated, however. For example, there is evidence consistent with the notion that certain populations have a general “distaste” for older participants.
More specifically, players are less likely to select old people for their teams, even taking into account differences in expected returns from the differing strategies of the elderly. In general, whites, old people, and women cooperate more in the game. Mixed racial teams cooperate more than do all-white teams. Perhaps most surprisingly, even with these very high stakes, players cooperate far more than economic theory would predict. They cooperate about as much as they do in the games with lower stakes.
Here is the paper. Here is John’s home page. Here is my previous post on John.
If “Perhaps most surprisingly, even with these very high stakes, players cooperate far more than economic theory would predict,” it must be time to revise the theory.
You tend to see the same thing on “Survivor” (which show, by the by, I think has a paper or two buried in it itself.) From the first season on, there’s been a clear bias against keeping on older folks. This isn’t entirely surprising given the physical nature of much of the game, but you see it come into play even when the younger candidates for expulsion don’t have any clear or apparent physical edge over the older ones.
You tend to see the same thing on “Survivor” (which show, by the by, I think has a paper or two buried in it itself.) From the first season on, there’s been a clear bias against keeping on older folks. This isn’t entirely surprising given the physical nature of much of the game, but you see it come into play even when the younger candidates for expulsion don’t have any clear or apparent physical edge over the older ones.
They found similar patterns on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. The old ones were consistently booted. In fact, at least in Britain, where the sense of Irony is developed to a supreme art form, the players actually started mentioning age as the reason they booted them (‘I didnt like him, He’s old’), for ratings effects.
I think you mean The Weakest Link, where early dismissals of older players is certainly a detectable pattern on the American version as well. To my knowledge, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire doesn’t have a cooperative component.
Actually, I would expect an abnormally high level of cooperation. In addition to the stakes of the game, the players’ friends, family and coworkers will be watching. Their reputations outside of the game are at stake as well.
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