A new setup for social games suggests that when people are given the freedom to tailor their actions to different people in their networks, they become significantly more cooperative, trusting and fair.
The international study with Kobe University participation thus argues that many standard experimental setups of cooperation underestimate people’s prosocial potential. The findings are published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
Games that are models of social interactions are used in sciences spanning from sociology and anthropology to psychology and economics, giving us very concrete data on how likely it is that people behave in a certain way in certain social contexts. For example, when modeling how people cooperate in social networks, one such game shows that only roughly one in seven people end up being cooperative in the long run.
Traditional experiments may limit cooperation
“Most experiments on games on networks, however, assume that players must act uniformly toward everyone in their network and overlook the capacity of humans to actively manage their social networks,” says Kobe University computational social scientist Ivan Romi?.
Together with Danyang Jia and Zhen Wang at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi’an, Romi? therefore designed an experimental setup that allows players to choose different actions toward their various neighbors in the prisoner’s dilemma and the trust and ultimatum games, games that model social cooperation and fairness.
They then recruited over 2,000 university students across China to play these games and varied the fraction of players who could choose their actions freely, allowing the researchers to find out how the freedom they afford their study participants influences the results.
Freedom boosts cooperation and fairness
“In the prisoner’s dilemma, cooperation rates rose from just 14% in constrained populations to over 80% when everyone had full agency. Trust and fairness showed similar improvements. Even in mixed populations where only some players had agency, the prosocial effects were substantial, although they also produced temporary spikes in inequality as free players learned to use their flexibility,” summarizes Romi?. Importantly, when all players were free to tailor their behavior, inequality decreased even as overall wealth increased.
The team also looked at how this behavior developed over time as the games were played repeatedly.
Jia, who coauthored the study, says, “We found that players with more freedom expressed their prosocial tendencies right from the first round. This wasn’t just about learning over time but about having the capacity to act differently from the start. We also found that as players gained agency, populations shifted toward conditional and prosocial behavioral types, such as tit-for-tat cooperators and generous trustors.
“Constrained players, by contrast, tended to default to antisocial strategies—not necessarily because they were selfish, but because the environment limited their options.”
Implications for future behavioral research
The team thus argues that many standard experimental setups of cooperation underestimate people’s prosocial potential by artificially restricting how social decisions are made.
Their findings highlight the need for behavioral experiments to reflect the realities of social interaction, specifically that individuals often tailor their actions to different people in their networks, for capturing the true dynamics of social behavior.
Romi? adds, “More generally, this suggests that equal opportunity to individualize one’s interactions benefits prosocial behavior.”
More information:
Danyang Jia et al, Social networking agency and prosociality are inextricably linked in economic games, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02289-0
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Kobe University
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