Module 3: Cooperation and cheating
In this module students will play the “Prisoner's Dilemma” game as a model for cooperation and defecting behavior. Students will be asked to create analogies between the game and life examples (human societies, eukaryotic cells, social insects, etc). Students will compare the benefits of cooperating and “cheating” in the game. Students will compare their scores with other classmates in order to build a graphical representation of the data in order to draw conclusions about the class' strategies.
Prisoner's dilemma and biology
What does the Prisoner's dilemma have to do with the evolution of cooperation? As with the prisoners, there are lots of situations in biology in which two individuals would benefit from cooperating, but each would do better still by defecting while the other cooperates. This is the difficulty of the evolution of cooperation: even when everyone would be better off if everyone cooperated, there is always a temptation to cheat. This module explores some of the ways cooperation can evolve in spite of the dilemma. strategies.