Probably for the same reason poor people are less selfish than rich people (there’s ample evidence for this): the harder one’s life, the more one understands that we depend on each other and that human success is predicated on being able to cooperate.
Prisoners are less selfish than students: “They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners — And The Results Were Not What You Would Expect” (Business Insider Australia)
Posted: 2013/07/24 by Punkonomics (@dearbalak) in Links/Articles/VideoTags: altruism, behavior, cooperative, game theory, microeconomics, Prisoner's dilemma, selfish
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Punkonomics (@DearBalak) 
Or, alternately, prisoners have means of enforcing social cooperation that go far beyond a matter of a couple of cups of coffee or cigarettes.
Personally, I’d think a fair sight deeper about screwing over Brunhilde from Cellblock C than some scrawny Econ classmate. But that’s me. Then again, I haven’t read the paper’s methodology, so I could be completely off base there. Still – have you actually read anything about prison social structures? They’re not some alienated caricature of a lumpenproletariat.
(By the way, per NPR, the results are an at best marginally significant cherry-picked p<0.1. Slow month for the journal, I guess)
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Haha. Well said :-)
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