Investigating Social Trends in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

Abstract

In ethics, many academics make the assumption that all people want to be good. Evil comes in where there is a conflict of “good” decisions, where a decision that is good for one person contradicts the good of another. In this case, a person will make a different decision depending on their definition of the “good” they want to accomplish. In a society that starts with an equal proportion of “selfishly good” and “selflessly good” people, we aim to investigate the convergence patterns motivations through simulation of populations playing the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma over time.