The Prisoner’s Dilemma

You and your partner are being held by the police and you are faced with a horrible choice. You can rat him out, thus reducing your sentence or you can protect your partner by saying nothing. If you both keep silent you will each receive 1 year in prison. If you turn him in and he says nothing, you will go free and he will get 4 years in prison. The reverse is true if he says you did it and you say nothing. If you both turn on the other, you each get 2 years in prison.

What do you do?

This is a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The history of the prisoner’s dilemma can be traced back to one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. John Von Newman’s influence can be felt in such diverse fields as quantum mechanics, economics, nuclear physics and cryptology. He is considered by many to be the father of modern computing and was a highly sought after advisor for the defense department during the cold war. However, in many ways Von Newman’s greatest influence might come, not from his professional work, but from one of his hobbies.

You see, John Von Newman loved to play poker. Unfortunately, despite his tremendous analytical powers, he wasn’t very good at it and he began to wonder if it was possible to apply mathematical theory to games. After all, mathematical models had been used to predict the incredibly complex dynamics of planets, electrons and explosions. Why couldn’t they be used to find the ideal strategy for poker, chess or tic-tac-toe. And, if that was possible, why not apply those strategies to big business, the stock market and geo-political military strategy. After all, aren’t those endeavors simply games on a grand scale?

Von Newman was joined in his quest by some of the greatest mathematicians of his time. Men like Richard Selton, and “The Beautiful Mind’s” John Nash made their reputations on game theory and one of the “games” they played over and over again in countless variations and repetitions was The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Every variation of the prisoner’s dilemma presents the player with two choices, which the game theorists name, “cooperate” and “defect”. To cooperate is to abide by the social construct and trust the other player to do the same. To defect is to betray the other player.

If you cooperate in this version of the prisoner’s dilemma, which means you say nothing, one of two things can happen. Either your friend also cooperates or he defects and turns you in. Therefore, the two possible outcomes are, that you get 1 year in prison or 4.

If you defect and turn your friend in, and he cooperates you will be set free. If he also defects you will get 2 years in prison. In other words, the two possible outcomes for defecting are 2 years in prison or none. The conclusion? Mathematically, you are better off defecting than cooperating.

So why is this important?

During the cold war, John Von Newman and other game theorists worked at the Rand Corporation, where they used these theories to map out our strategy against the Soviets. Their conclusion, the only logical solution to the cold war was to defect. Defecting in this case meant a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.

After all, the cold war is nothing more than a very dangerous Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two sides, are faced with two choices, cooperate by maintaining the peace, or defect and fire your missiles. If there is even the slightest possibility that the Soviets might strike the United States preemptively, an action which would be catastrophic for this country, then we must attack them first.

Fortunately for the world, cooler, and possibly wiser, heads prevailed. Unfortunately, this same argument for preemptive war has been used far more successfully in recent years.

Another variation.

A magazine advertises a contest where they will give away either $20.00 or $1000.00 to everyone who writes in. All you have to do is specify which amount you would like. The catch is that they will only pay if less than 20% of the respondents ask for $1000. If more than 20% ask for $1000.00 they will give out nothing and everyone loses. In other words, if everyone cooperates and asks for the lesser amount, everyone gets paid. If too many people defect, nobody gets anything.

What do you do?

Game theorists again conclude that you should defect because $20.00 is not a significant amount of money. It will have practically zero impact on your life. $1000.00, on the other hand, is significant. Therefore, it’s better to gamble on everyone else’s good will and try for the big money.

Think of this example, and then think of Enron, a company who’s only goal was to generate tremendous profits for a few, very rich, men. The fact that those profits came at the cost of their customers and stock holders or that the means to those profits were dishonest simply didn’t matter. If profits were the goal than the best strategy was to defect.

Today, game theory is one of the pillars of our nation’s economic and geopolitical strategy. It is taught in MBA programs, military academies and foreign policy seminars.

But it isn’t just the rich and powerful who are choosing defection. We live in a culture of “me first”, always asking not what we can do for our country but what our country can do for us. This attitude rises from the average citizen, callously tossing their garbage on the street, to the multi-national corporations callously spewing their pollutants into our environment.

Another variation.

It’s the middle of the night and you are alone in a subway station. You can either pay the $1.50 toll or jump the turnstile. There are no cameras, no police, no possibility of being caught. If you jump the turnstile you will be $1.50 richer. However, deep down you know that if everyone were to jump the turnstile, the subway system, which the whole community benefits from, would collapse.

What do you do?

Again, game theorists recommend defection. There are no negative consequences to your defection and the subway system will only collapse if an overwhelming number of people defect along with you and if that’s going to happen your $1.50 wont save the whole system.

What is so disturbing about game theory is how logical it is. This isn’t some pseudoscience, heralded by chanting mystics and slick salesman. This is a well-researched, deeply analyzed, theory, which seems to suggest that being “bad” is far more profitable than being “good”. And yet, at the heart of Game Theory lies the certain knowledge that if everyone subscribed to its precepts our world, as we know it, would fall apart.

But the prisoner’s dilemma has a flaw, not in its conclusions but in its formulation. The Prisoner’s Dilemma asks, “Which strategy works most effectively to your best interests?” It does not bother to define what our best interests are, or even if that’s the only question we can ask.

Today, in this country, self-interest is generally accepted as the prime motivator of every social interaction. However, this was not always the case. In fact, for most of human history other interests were considered equally or even more important than self-interest. In pre-communist China, women would willingly sell themselves into virtual slavery for the sake of their families. In 12th Century Europe, peasants and artisans, worked under impossible conditions, spending their life’s blood for an unseen deity. In feudal Japan, a Samurai would willingly disembowel himself at the slightest whim of his liege lord. The image of a soldier heroically throwing himself on a life grenade to save his friends is evidence that other motivations than self-interest can be extremely powerful.

How would the solution to the prisoner’s dilemma change if instead of asking for the strategy which best served your need, we asked which one is best for your friends, your country, or your God?

This is further complicated by the fact that while The Prisoner’s Dilemma exists in a vacuum, free from equivocating and compromising circumstances, we do not. Our lives and experience form the background data for our current decisions, just as those decisions form the foundation of our futures.

What if we return to the police station, only this time it is with the certain knowledge that our partner is a known rat who has sold out everyone he’s ever worked with? Under these circumstances the only rational strategy is to defect. Just as if you are the ruler of a nation who has just come into conflict with another nation known for a policy of pre-emptive war, you no longer have the luxury to wait for peaceful solutions. All evidence suggests that you must attack first.

We are, above all else, products of our environment. It is irrational to assume that a child raised in a world of violence will adopt a philosophy of pacifism just as one wouldn’t expect someone raised in a world of religious absolutism to embrace a philosophy of pure science. There are exceptions to this, of course, but those exceptional people are frequently destroyed by the societies they rebel against.

The prisoner’s dilemma is more than just a strategic tool. It is a litmus test for how we view the world. Do we see the purpose of life as merely the unrestrained quest for our own self-interest or are we guided by a higher calling.

Our response to the Prisoner’s dilemma is more than just an expression of our present desires. It is harbinger of things to come. Every decision, we make effects the world around us. Every act of kindness, no matter how small, makes it that much more likely that others will act kindly. Every act violence, sends ripples of distrust throughout the world, creating fertile ground for more destructive behavior.

We all live, day to day, in a prisoner’s dilemma, forced to choose between our needs and those of our friends, family, community and environment. Any system which continually sacrifices the needs of the community to the desires of the individual will descend into anarchy and distrust. Just as any system which continually sacrifices the needs of the individual to that of the state will deteriorate into oppression and abuse.

The solution, I believe, is one of balance, in which the first strategy is always cooperation, even if it means sacrificing some of what we see as our short term self-interest. However, we must also be prepared to protect ourselves when our good intentions are met with abuse.

Perhaps, the best solution to The Prisoner’s Dilemma is the golden one. Do onto others as you would have others do onto you. It isn’t an easy rule to live by, but, in the long run, the more of us who follow it, the better the world becomes.