Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What cognitive abilities do we need to cooperate? Studies of simple cooperative games often focus on the role of reputation, reciprocity, and other-regarding preferences. Real-world social dilemmas, however, are characterized by the diverse capabilities and needs of the individuals within them. These create situations where reciprocity, for example, is not enough. A person who receives important help cannot directly return the favor. While diversity can present new ways to prosper, it may require different abilities to discover and maintain highly-structured cooperative "cycles". We present a multi-agent resource exchange game–the "Mars Colony game"–that captures the essence of these complexities. We study the impact of preferences (selfish and other-regarding) and strategies (direct and indirect reciprocity, and causal attribution) on emergent cooperation.