Personality Traits and Routes to Cooperation in Two-Player Public Good Games

People are expected to cooperate in a repeated prisoner dilemma game. However, there always some players cannot come to the coordination and fail to cooperate in the experiments, even in ordinary lives. Personality traits are considered to be a key factor to determine players´ choice in games. We conducts some behavioral experiments of public good game in which there are only two players in each group. We find that the experiments exhibit three kinds of patterns of cooperation includes quick coordination, slow coordination and lack coordination. We use the Eysenck personality questionnaire to measure subjects´ personality traits. The experiment results show that extraversion and psychoticism has negative and positive relationship with the initial contribution level respectively. Subjects who fail to achieve the cooperation coordination are more psychotic and less extroverted. Subjects who tend to break the coordination and take advantage of opponents have high scores in the extraversion dimension. Subjects who tend to forgive and punish a cooperation breaker mainly differ in psychoticism dimension.