The Impact of Strategy Awareness on Student Rationality within the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game

Abstract

This study determined the importance of strategy awareness on student rationality within the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game in a Central High School. The Prisoner’s Dilemma Game is a model that tests rationality and has an underlying strategy: Rationality can be tested by the number of participants that behave in accordance with the strategy. 57 Participants were provided with three Prisoner’s Dilemma Game scenarios via survey to assess how rationally each player would behave in each respective scenario. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups, in which one group possessed the optimal strategy for each scenario while the other group did not. Each scenario had one best option that could have been selected. The two groups were compared to assess if students with access to the optimal strategy behaved in accordance with the strategy more so than the group without the optimal strategy; This is how rationality was measured. The differences in rationality between the two groups were insignificant, thus demonstrating that strategy awareness has a minimal impact on the rationality of students in the scenarios. However, these findings could be further explained by confounding variables, such as Age and AP Classroom Enrollment. The findings signify that students are not rational when making decisions because the students ignored outside information such as the optimal strategy when making a decision within the scenarios. Moving forwards, this demonstrates the need for students to learn how to use surrounding resources to make optimal decisions, which is an important skill outside of high school.