Social preferences and cooperation in simple social dilemma games.

We use a laboratory experiment to examine the role of social preferences in simple one-shot social dilemma games by comparing play with and without a human counterpart. We find that cooperation rates are slightly lower without a human counterpart in all games we consider. However, the difference is small and statistically insignificant, suggesting that social preferences are not the primary driver of cooperation in one-shot social dilemma games.