The conflict game: understanding empathy and cooperation with strategic dilemmas in citizenship education

This study investigates how individuals cooperate in strategic dilemmas under varying levels of conflict, with a focus on the role of empathy and reciprocity. Using a modified version of the 2×2 Conflict Game, we examine whether dispositional empathy—measured through the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI)—predicts cooperative behavior, and whether sequential decisions elicit reciprocal responses. Our results show that higher levels of conflict reduce cooperation, while cognitive empathy and observed cooperation from others increase prosocial choices. Importantly, this experiment was conducted with a large, diverse sample of university students (N = 2,496) in a non-incentivized setting, using minimal infrastructure during a compulsory citizenship education course. Although the study was not designed to evaluate pedagogical outcomes, our implementation demonstrates that behavioral experiments can be successfully adapted to large-scale classroom environments. This contributes methodologically to the growing literature on scalable experimental designs in education, while advancing theoretical understanding of empathy and reciprocity in conflict-based decision-making.