Using experimental game theory to measure cooperative relations in elementary school classrooms to understand its relationship with academic performance and school climate
Authors:   ,   Universidad del Desarrollo, Landaeta Torres Víctor 
Published: March 2023

Cooperation has been key to our success as a species. Cooperative behavior on multiple levels and the structures that emerge from those interactions have been extending over different domains and scopes, from small food-sharing networks among hunter-gatherers to global trade and the generation and diffusion of knowledge and technology worldwide. Groups and societies have been creating and changing increasingly complex social mechanisms and institutions to allow, promote, and support cooperation and its scaling. All these efforts have boosted and expanded the benefits of cooperation but also have increased our interdependence between different actors, which also implies higher systemic risks. Cooperative Networks in small groups are the essential building blocks to sustain and promote large-scale cooperation. Moreover, large-scale cooperation is possibly our best chance to face today’s most significant global challenges and threats, such as climate change and global pandemics. Schools are crucial for human development. Here, we first face peers and learn how to cooperate with strangers. The school’s main goals are socialization, the transmission of culture, and teaching knowledge and skills. Classrooms, in many ways, have a similar tribe-like structure and a nested and controlled general situation, so dynamic cooperative networks emerge and mutate. Two main challenges for schools nowadays are about learning and well-being. In specific, how can we improve learning and achievement? And, how can we make school a safer, bullying-free place? Cooperative learning literature has consistently found that creating more cooperative learning environments has causal effects on increased academic achievement and decreased bullying behavior. However, no precise mechanism is known. So, our main research question over this work is the following: How cooperative networks in the classroom relate with other educational outcomes, particularly Academic Achievement and Bullying Behavior? But, how can we measure cooperation in the class, and elicit these networks? We propose that we can use experimental Game Theory, specifically implementing in the field an adaptation of a lab game-theoretic social dilemma, which try to reproduce with ecological similarities the tension between individual interests and social efficiency that students face in real life everyday interactions in the classroom. The essential concept is External Validity. We expect that the student’s behavior in the game will reflect their day-to-day behavior and classroom structure. The dyadic social dilemma we implement is a modified version of the Prisoner’s dilemma. A major adjustment is that in this game, students are aware of the partner’s identity that has been matched to them each round, i.e., the game is non-anonymous. Thereby, their choices when playing again each other are not only the result of intrinsic prosocial dispositions (or their absence), but also the result of their history and the perceptions they have about each other. In the first chapter, our first draft paper tackles the relationship between cooperative network topology and academic performance. We measured the cooperative centrality of students by quantifying their deviations from the average level of reciprocal cooperation in each interaction and found that students that engaged in high levels of reciprocal cooperation have significantly higher GPAs. In the second chapter, our second draft paper characterized the relationship between cooperative network topology and bullying subtypes. We categorized students on their bullying involvement in four different social categories: bully, bully-victim, victim, and non-involved students. Then, we use the data from the experiment combined with a self-report instrument and using multilevel modeling, we study how bullies, victims and bully-victims differ in their access to the elicited cooperative network. We found that bully/victims and victims tend to receive less tokens than non-involved students. Both articles have important policy implications to the extent that they can inform the design of interventions in the early phases of education to improve both academic achievement and social coexistence