The Prime Ultimatum
No, it's not a Matt Damon film... Richard Wiseman has an interesting experiment over at his blog this week. Have a look at it before you read on - or if you do read my post first, please don't participate in his experiment in case you bias the results. Back now? The experiment combines two really interesting cognitive principles. It's an example of the ultimatum game , a game theory experiment which measures our attitude to fairness. In a rational world, the person making the split should offer their partner just £1 (or even £0) and the partner would have no reason to refuse. In the real world, people do tend to refuse offers less than about £3, and knowing this, the offerer tends to offer an average of about £4.40, with a strong peak on the even split, £5. One thing that interests me is that many of the commenters - even though they are on the blog of a leading popular psychologist - have evidently never heard of the ultimatum game, which is one of the most famo...