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MRI Study Shows We're Wired to Cooperate
ibi writes "The NYT reports that humans apparently have an inborne bias towards cooperation. People who cooperated during standard Prisoner's Dilemma tests registered high levels of activity in the pleasure centers of their brains. This result was the opposite of what the researchers were expecting. (But I bet they were testing students rather than their advisers :-)"
How could humans have developed a society, the arts and modern civiliation if they wanted to be independant. Of course it feels good to help others and there is security in working as a group, be it cavemen or street kids forming a gang. Humans are social, this seems crazy to assume otherwise. As described in "A Beautiful Mind" which was a pretty good movie but a little too much about mental illness and not the accomplishments of the main character. The main characters "big idea" is that if everyone is out for themselves everyone just ends up fighting each other and everyone looses, if on the other hand you work together and cooperate no one gets the ideal goal but everyone does well and evolution is about survival not being the strongest.
Why is this the opposite of what the researchers were expecting? Game theory was not invented by evil capitalists, it was developed to describe observed situations and quantify rational decisions. It is trivial to demonstrate that cooperation (or "tit for tat") is the winningest strategy in an infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. It should come as no surprise that humans have evolved to choose the winning strategy in such situations.
Another Prisoner's Dilemma: if a moderator mods me down, and I am insightful, then we both lose (me right now, and the mod in metamoderation). But if he mods me down and I am trolling, then he wins and I lose. And if he mods me up and I am trolling, then I win and he loses. However, if he mods me up and I am insightful, then we break even again.
So which is it, punk?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Try doing the same study with lawyers, executives, and politicians. Lets see, put
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Hillary Rosen
Jack Valentini
Fritz Hollings
Whaley (from Enron)
Johny Cochraine
Gary Wennig (from Global Crossings)
in a room together. See if they all manage to cooperate.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I was skimming "Game Theory Evolving", which walks through various hypotheses for why humans act the way they do. That's the result they came up with, that people are programmed to play tit-for-tat. I'm not sure if the initial bias was towards cooperation, but I think it was.
I recall that they found that "homo reciprocans", who does to you what you do to them, matched people's behavior best, even in one-time situations where the other guy would never get the chance to do to you what you did to them. Also found that even a small group such people could survive and prosper in a sea of selfish people by sticking together.
Another result was that people model every situation as analogous to previous situations, and they treat one-time psychological experiments as "us against them", where "them" is the researchers.
Uh does this really say much about mens brains? The study was entirely female, other studies have shown that mens and womans brains are very differnt.
It would be most interesting to find at what price level would the cooperation break down. What if defecting brought $1000, mutual cooperation $100 and mutual defection $25?
Changing the reward structure will completely alter the game. It will also show another dimension to the problem. When the stakes are low it maybe that the pleasure derived from cooperating is taking over but what about when it's more? What about when it's life and death?
I wonder...
I hate the fact that you people don't salute me
Take driving for example. We have a major road running from the downtown to the outskirts of our city that is 4 lanes wide (most of the time). The curb lane allows for parking during the day but not during rush hour. So it should be open during rush hour, however, there is always a car stopping or parking or a city bus is lumbering along. The congestion that arises from large numbers of vehicles constantly trying to merge from 4 to 3 lanes would reak havoc on the overall system, therefore the most effecient strategy for the masses is to stick to just 3 lanes.
The speed limit is 60kph. During rush hour, the actual speed in the 3 lanes when volumes get heavy is more like 50kph. With the open lane (parking lane - or as I like to call it, the Express Lane), you can easily do 70 - 80kph (interesting side note: I've been driving this route for years without ever seeing anyone pulled over during the rush hour). However, if too many people 'defect', the average speed in the Express Lane drops to 30-40kph. Do you take the express lane?
Being a defector, most days I am able to get ahead of the masses - saving many minutes off my travel time. The risks? If too many join me, (or if I don't pay attention to slower/stopped traffic ahead of me) there is a dramatic reduction in the average speed. In other words, I can loose big time.
BTW, before I'm flamed as being a offensive / dangerous driver, allow me to explain my 3 priorities for getting home in order of descending importance:
- Get home safely.
- Do not do anything that causes other drivers to have to react defensively.
- Get home as fast as possible.
I'm aggressive, or defensive. I'm assertive.I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
I ran across a good cartoon at Strange Matter which seems to have gone down (permenantly?). Either way the caption is something along the lines of "The true cause of the extinction of the neanderthals" and has a group standing arround and one announcing "From now on all our survival decisions will be made by committee." :)
I stole this Sig
In college, we were doing a bit of prisoner's dilemma/game theory in micro-economics. A friend of mine in the class had heard we would be playing a game in class based on this, and that which ever person had the highest point total at the end would win girl scout cookies.
Well, with that on the line, we set to work. Each time, I would pick cooperate, and he'd choose to screw me over. It was really no surprise that at that point he was in the lead in the class. After this was done, there was a second round using the entire class (and a majority to decide which way things would go), and through a few smart decisions, he cinched it and won the cookies.
As we were leaving class, a couple said to me (noting my poor performance earlier) "Wow, you're really not very good at that are you?" So, I pulled out my half of the girl scout cookies and laughed and said "I think I did alright."
Wow, this supports what I've been thinking for many years -- that excessive personal ambition and competetive spirit are mental aberrations. The very nature of these defects drives those who suffer from them into positions of power, where they make life miserable for the rest of us.