The future of social experimenting

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Abstract
Recent laboratory experiments by Traulsen et al. (1) for the spatial prisoner's dilemma suggest that exploratory behavior of human subjects prevents cooperation through neighborhood interactions over experimentally accessible time spans. This indicates that new theoretical and experimental efforts are needed to explore the mechanisms underlying a number of famous puzzles in the social sciences. Cooperation is the essence that keeps societies together. It is the basis of solidarity and social order. When humans stop cooperating, a war of everybody against everybody can result. Understanding why and under what conditions humans cooperate is, therefore, one of the grand challenges of science (2), particularly in social dilemma situations (where collective cooperation would be beneficial, but individual free-riding is the most profitable strategy). When humans have social dilemma-type interactions with randomly changing partners, a “tragedy of the commons” (3), i.e., massive free-riding, is expected to occur. But how are humans then able to create public goods (such as a shared culture or a public infrastructure) and build functioning social benefit systems despite their self-interest? Under what conditions will they be able to fight global warming collectively? To answer related research questions, scientists have experimentally studied, among other factors, the influence of spatial and network interactions on the level of cooperation in various games, including nondilemmatic ones (4–6). In their laboratory experiments, Traulsen et al. (1) have now implemented Nowak's and May's prisoner's dilemma in two-dimensional space (7), where the size of the two-dimensional spatial grid, the number of interaction partners, and the payoff parameters are modified for experimental reasons. The prisoner's dilemma describes interactions between pairs of individuals, where free-riding is tempting, and cooperation is risky. Therefore, if individuals interact with different people each time (as in the case of well-mixed interactions), everybody … 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dhelbing{at}ethz.ch.
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