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[jasonlulu_2000]

Rewards improve cooperationThey had about two hundred college students play a version of the game known as the Prisoner's Dilemma. The game is based on the tension between the interests of an individual and a group.

The students played in groups of four. Each player could win points for the group, so they would all gain equally. But each player could also reward or punish each of the other three players, at a cost to the punisher.
Harvard researcher David Rand says the most successful behavior proved to be cooperation. The groups that rewarded it the most earned about twice as much in the game as the groups that rewarded it the least.

And the more a group punished itself, the lower its earnings. The group with the most punishment earned twenty-five percent less than the group with the least punishment. The study appeared last month in the journal Science.

Could you paraphrase the underlined sentence and give me a rule of this game according to the passage?

thanks

[CP]

Imagine this: Two people are arrested for committing some crime.

The police keep them separated and tell each prisoner that if he confesses and testifies against his partner, he will get a light sentence (say, two years), and his partner will get a heavy sentence (say, 12 years). Each one therefore has an incentive to confess, betraying the other. If both confess, both will get an intermediate sentence (say, 5 years).

However, if both of them remain quiet, the police have no evidence, and both will go free.

So the prisoner's dilemma is whether to keep quiet and trust the other prisoner to keep quiet--resulting in freedom for both--or speak up and guarantee a lighter sentence, depending upon what the other prisoner does.

Of course cooperation is the smartest choice, but that requires trust and mutuality. If I keep quiet, trusting you, but you squeal, I go to prison for a long stretch. That's my dilemma.

Research psychologists have used variations on the prisoner's dilemma (or PD, as the researchers call it) to investigate motivation and decision making for decades. They can present the experimental subjects with various incentives to see what it takes to encourage cooperation or what not. And they can adapt it to more than two players with conflicting motives and instructions as well.
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[jasonlulu_2000]

Really appreciate your detailed help.