Cooperation and trust in the presence of bias

Abstract

Stereotypes may influence the attitudes that individuals have towards others. Stereotypes, therefore, represent biases toward and against others. In this paper, we formalise stereotypical bias within trust evaluations. Then, using the iterated prisoners’ dilemma game, we quantitatively analyse how cooperation and mutual trust between self-interested agents are affected by stereotypical bias. We present two key findings: i) stereotypical bias of one player may inhibit cooperation by creating incentives for others to defect, ii) even if only one of the players has a stereotypical bias, convergence of mutual trust between players may be strictly determined by the bias.