Cooperation versus non-cooperation

The choice for cooperation can be based upon research on the matter. The research field isn’t psychology or sociology, those disciplines usually do not touch such sensitive issues, but that called game theory. Game theory isn’t about child games, but about all situations where human being interact through some set of rules, while negotiating with each other, try to get the best of things. It was more or less invented by the mathematician John von Neumann, in efforts to describe economic behavior. The archetypal situation for game theory is the prisoner dilemma.

The prisoner dilemma is the plight of two criminals that have committed a crime together, have been arrested, and are kept in separate cells in order to keep them from communicating. Both are given the possibility of making a deal: if you confess, you go free, but your mate goes to prison for five years. From this suggested deal they both know that the case against them isn’t very strong, and if they both keep shut, they will probably get away with one or two years. But for each goes that by keeping shut he runs the risk of his mate betraying him; a dilemma indeed.

This dilemma was translated into a more abstract situation using points to rewards moves, one called cooperative (keeping shut), and one non-cooperative (betrayal). The prisoners where replaced by computer programs making the moves, according to rules incorporated in the program (the thinking or reasoning). The researcher published a competition, inviting everyone to make programs to play the game. A few dozen were entered, and the winner by a distance was a program called tit-for-tat, written by Anatol Rapoport, which was a very surprising winner, because it was by far the simplest program. In fact it knew only four lines of code, and programs do not come much simpler. It does what the name says: if you make a non-cooperative move, it also makes one non-cooperative move. Otherwise it makes cooperative moves.

The results of the competition were published, including the code for tit-for-tat, with an explicit challenge to do better. Again tit-for-tat won by a distance, the only real competition coming from two-tits-for-tat. In later competitions improvements were made, but the essential character remained that the most successful strategy is by nature cooperative, and quickly forgives.

These scientific results correspond to a lot of daily experience that goes back at least to the days of Confucius, since his philosophy also entails a lot of these principles. These arguments are here considered good enough to take rule one as the basis of our rational vision.
 

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