Mobile Game Theory with Street Gangs

Gang violence remains a persistent public safety problem in Los Angeles. Gang interventionists and community organizers are turning to proactive peacekeeping, a process of addressing the underlying structures that cause young people to join gangs such as pervasive poverty and marginalization. Given the increasing prevalence and decreasing cost of mobile technology, there may be opportunities for interventionists to employ technological solutions in their work. However, before such solutions can be deployed, it is necessary to have accurate models of the target users—in this case, gang-involved youth. Of particular interest with regard proactive peacekeeping is their propensity for cooperation. However, given the unique circumstances surrounding the lives of gang-involved youth, traditional laboratory-based experiments measuring cooperation are infeasible. In this paper, we present a novel method of collecting experimental data from gang-involved youth in the Los Angeles area. We design a mobile application based on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma model, which has been used to collect almost 3000 data points on cooperation from more than 20 participants. We present initial results that show despite their unique life circumstances gang-involved youth cooperate at roughly the same rate as university students in classic studies of cooperation. We conclude by addressing the implications of this result for future work and proactive peacekeeping endeavors.