Greedy Vs Altruistic Behaviour in Ultimatum Games

In the most recent reading we were assigned, more specifically “Who Killed Homo Economicus?” in Chapter 7, there was discussion of ultimatum games and the type of people who play them. There are the greedy people, and altruistic people, and it discussed how they would react to one another if faced with multiple interactions or even generations with one another. Then he discussed how humans generally react with these ultimatum games, the illogical decision (or the non evolutionary beneficial option) of not taking all that we can take, and giving some of the money away to a person we’ve never met. This is generally believed to occur because humans have a concept of fairness and what some interpret as an evolutionary evolved predisposition to not be greedy so as to possibly allow reciprocity on the kindness offered for their future benefit.

Either way, I learned about a version of this model where there is a small spectrum of people who interact with each other: Very Greedy, Moderately Greedy, Fair, Moderately Altruistic, and Very Altruistic. Here are the diagrams that came with it. The colours are Black, red, blue, yellow, and white, representing people ranging from black being Very Greedy and white being Very Altruistic (the person who organized this might have been subconsciously racist).

The first image shows how each person is a colour coded pixel and what happens is they each interact with each of their neighbors in an ultimatum game. There will be winners and losers, and each pixel will observe and change their strategy to the strategy that did the best around them (could remain the same if they did well too) for the next generation, the next picture. This shows how people interact with their neighbors and learn behaviour through their social networks. It doesn’t have to be literal neighbors, but nodes and edges in a very uniform network for example. A side note: it reminds me of that model of clusters of happy vs depressed people in chapter 2, how there are clusters of happy, neutral and depressed people all around each other and how we can learn or contract their emotional state

Anyway, this model continues for many generations, and what happens is Greedy wins over the first generation, but then pockets of other milder strategies, with a tendency towards greedy (altruistic is basically gone) and eventually larger and larger groups of fair crop up and take over. I thought it was a really interesting mathematical model, and this is all I have of it but I’m interested to see where it will go past this, such as different variations or starting points. What I do know is that these patters will generally follow this flow chart until they hit the equilibriums of either all fair at the top or half greedy and half altruistic.