The social world as an experimental game

This paper presents a selective review of decades of empirical research on behavioral games, with a particular focus on experimental games. We suggest that games effectively (but imperfectly) model many human social interactions, and we present important findings from six popular experimental games – Prisoner’s and Social Dilemmas, and the Trust, Ultimatum, Dictator, and Deception games – to discuss their theoretical and empirical implications as well as their various insights into human nature. We close by asking several fundamental questions about games and suggesting several directions and ideas for future research.