The Influence of Automation and Culture on Human Cooperation

In recent years, intelligent machines which can act on our behalf, such as autonomous vehicles, are in increasing numbers. They follow preset procedures and make decisions for people when certain conditions are reached. These machines improve the efficiency of our daily life as well as bring us a new paradigm of interaction with other people. Setting the program for the machine in advance enables us to make an early decision and provides us with a chance to think more comprehensively from a macro perspective. In this case, how the change of this decision-making paradigm will affect our cooperative behavior with others is the main research question of this study. This article proved that the cooperation rate of participants interacting with others by programming the autonomous vehicle in advance was higher than the direct interaction cooperation rate. A conclusion can be drawn through the experiment that when the system can automatically make decisions and participants can modify the decisions, the higher the initial cooperation rate of the system was, the higher the final cooperation rate of the participants would be. From this, it can be preliminarily concluded that the automation system can guide people to choose cooperation more. In addition, compared with the results of similar studies abroad, it can be found that people’s cooperative behavior is different due to different cultural backgrounds. Chinese culture advocates the doctrine of the mean, and the participants’ choices of cooperation or betrayal are more balanced. In contrast, western culture is more rational and extreme, in which a large part of the participants chooses to cooperate completely or betray completely.