The Machine Psychology of Cooperation: Can GPT models operationalise prompts for altruism, cooperation, competitiveness and selfishness in economic games?

We investigated the capability of the GPT-3.5 large language model (LLM) to operationalize natural language descriptions of cooperative, competitive, altruistic, and self-interested behavior in two social dilemmas: the repeated Prisoners Dilemma and the one-shot Dictator Game. Using a within-subject experimental design, we used a prompt to describe the task environment using a similar protocol to that used in experimental psychology studies with human subjects. We tested our research question by...