The Evolution of Cooperation
Tucker, William
T h i s book is a landmark in social thought. For centuries, centralists and statists have been able to dismiss the doctrine of laissez-faire by saying that nothing will happen if government...
...It shows how cooperation evolves spontaneously-without the intervention of a centralized authority, and without the need for altruism...
...William Tucker is a contributing editor of Harper's...
...That's it...
...Small populations of cooperating individuals can establish themselves in a noncooperating society, mainly through cooperation with each other, and setAddress (please prinl) City State ring a good example to the noncooperators...
...In most societies, traders are a small group of outsiders--Jews, Chinese, Arabs, Armenians--who do not try to "convert" the larger population, but prosper through the advantage they achieve in cooperating among themselves, and eliciting cooperative behavior from others...
...Would that we could establish a social milieu in which the same basic rules applied...
...The results were astonishing...
...How did new forms of social cooperation ever evolve, then...
...It extracts only an equal amount of punishment for each betrayal...
...The implication is clear...
...The" Protestant ethic" became the format for voluntary cooperation on which the economic prosperity of the West was built...
...He has solved the problem of how the whole incredible success story of human ~ooperation has come about...
...One of the hardest tasks for people playing the Prisoner's Dilemma, he says, is to resist the impulse to betray the other player simply because he is doing well--even if you are doing well yourself...
...It is a triumphant vindication of plain old common sense...
...Real cooperation is a spontaneous phenomenon...
...And fourth, it is easy to understand...
...If both confess, both get a "punishment," which is slightly better than the sucker's payoff, but not as good as winning through cooperation...
...What about "social stability," for example...
...This doesn't surprise me...
...All this is marvelous news for people who think that "tit for tat" is a sensible and realistic way to run such basic institutions as the justice system, commerce, foreign policy, and society in general...
...The principle of TIT FOR TAT--which is the way most human beings play the game of life--has evolved because it is the most successful way of getting other people to cooperate--whether it be for trading, restraining from violence, borrowing and lending, or cooperating in a collective effort...
...As Thomas Shelling, of Harvard, comments on the jacket: " I t is a joy to watch somebody coax so much out of a good idea...
...Ironically, the one place where Axelrod falls down is in his own specialty--political science...
...Nor was it dreamed up by social philosophers trying to implement the "perfect and just" society of their imaginations...
...All successful entrepreneurs know this...
...What is even more remarkable is the way in which TIT FOR TAT achieved its own success...
...In fact, because of TIT FOR TAT 'S willingness to punish infractions swiftly and surely, it is less vulnerable to exploitation than other strategies that are either more lenient or more vengeful toward people who are trying to take advantage of them...
...This provokes betrayals, and soon both players start to lose...
...If they cooperate and do not betray each other, then neither will be convicted...
...cooperate while the other betrays you ("sucker's payoff"), 0 points...
...Both are urged to confess...
...The game goes like this...
...Axelrod provides the answer...
...There are all sorts of other marvelous insights in this book...
...But this is only a small matter...
...In both tournaments--the first involving 15 different strategies, the second 63--the simplest strategy won...
...It cooperates on the first round...
...In fact, I would say that the great portion of our laws are simply attempts by one or another group in society to escape the frustrations of having to cooperate with each other...
...The principle of "eye for an eye," you may recall, was originally set up to limit punishment and reduce excessive vengeance...
...As von Mises and Hayek have pointed out, the " f r e e . m a r k e t " is nothing more than the trading arrangements that arise spontaneously when people are left free to pursue their own economic interests...
...One of the truly frightening implications Axelrod discovered is that a population in which everyone always betrays everyone else is also perfectly stable and invulnerable to invasion...
...Groups that had evolved similar cooperating ethics in their own societies have found it very easy to join this trade-based system--particularly in such an open society as America...
...They do this by persuading the state to coerce the other party into playing the game on unequal terms...
...betray each other ("punishment"), 1 point each...
...Moreover, Axelrod's analysis makes clear that when liberals and socialists talk about "cooperation"--when they argue, for example, that "we must have a society based on cooperatiori, and not competition"--they are not really talking about cooperation at all...
...What Axelrod did was to arrange a computer tournament, in which he invited famous mathematicians and other theorists to submit strategies on how they would play the game over a long series of encounters...
...In order to get a high score, it is necessary to come up with a pattern of behavior that produces mutual cooperation, without running the risk of being "suckered" too often by the other player...
...What they are describing is a system in which "altruism" is imposed on people from the top down--by centralized coercion...
...But the Austrians were never really able to pinpoint the exact mechanism by which this spontaneous cooperation arose...
...Instead, it evolved out of the plain, common-sense wisdom of ordinary human beings, inventing and reinventing the simplest of all strategies ever developed for eliciting cooperative behavior out of one another--the grand old game of "tit for t a t...
...This simple bit of human wisdom-the implicit principle behind every justice system--successfully outcompeted more than 75 other expert strategies--many of them devised to compete in the most subtle, devious, or complicated fashions...
...If one confesses and implicates the other, however, he receives a larger bonus, called the "temptation" payoff, while the "sucker" who cooperated without being reciprocated receives nothing...
...But successful cooperation always arouses the suspicion that the other person is doing well because he is "exp l o i t i n g " you...
...The phenomenon of a "small group of cooperators" invading a broader "non-cooperating society" is, of course, just the way capitalism evolved...
...It is only lately that we have begun to think of it as too severe...
...Robert Axelrod, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan, built his discoveries out of a game called "the Prisoner's Dilemma...
...Third, although retaliatory, it is not vengeful...
...Second, it is "retaliatory," in that it does not let infractions go unpunished, but reciprocates immediately...
...With only one exception (which turned out to be a kind of anomaly), the "nice" strategies were all bunched at the top, while the "not nice" strategies formed a separate subclass at the bottom...
...Axelrod--who was astonished by the result--attributes the success of TIT FOR TAT to four basic qualities: First, he says, TIT FOR TAT is "nice," meaning that it never betrays first...
...Many of the strategies were "too smart for their own good," and ran afoul because they failed to convey a clear and comprehensible message to the other player...
...No one, however, has ever been able to describe exactly how these constructive human interactions arise without someone "planning" it...
...Then he played all the strategies off against each other by computer to see which one accumulated the highest long-term score...
...TIT FOR TAT plays the Prisoner's Dilemma in the following manner...
...The nice strategies always did better...
...For example, when played against each other in lengthy computer tournaments, the strategies quickly separated themselves into two categories...
...Can a population of "good guys" playing TIT FOR TAT be successfully invaded by a population of "meanies" coming in and trying to take advantage of their cooperative behavior...
...It cannot be engineered by an outside authority...
...If the other player cooperated on the previous round, TIT FOR TAT cooperates...
...By taking an optimistic attitude, by firmly and fairly punishing any infractions, and by not being too complicated about the whole thing, TIT FOR TAT was able to establish an environment in which other players eventually found cooperation the best strategy-whatever their original intentions...
...As Axelrod points out, its great strength was not in beating other players, but in eliciting cooperative behavior from them...
...After that, it always does what the other player did on the previous round...
...He sees the political game only in terms of tradeoffs between legislators, and entirely misses the point that most "politics" is a matter of superceding the voluntary cooperation of the marketplace with the coercion of the political system...
...A l l this has enormous implications for the historical development of capitalism...
...The supporters of the free market and "natural liberty," on the other hand, have based their position on the intuitive perception that constructive human actions do not have to be instigated by a central authority, but come about spontaneously...
...Rent controls, farm price supports, regulated competition, trade b a r r i e r s - - a l m o s t all forms o f economic legislation are just a way of providing one player with an escape from the Prisoner's Dilemma, at the expense of the others...
...It didn't happen because it was planned by the government...
...But there is even more...
...The Evolution of Cooperation provides the answer...
...The main point is that Axelrod, in The Evolution o f Cooperation, has finally offered a working mathematical model for the "system of natural liberty" originally preached by Adam Smith...
...This strategy was called TIT FOR TAT, submitted by Canadian psychologist Anatol Rapoport...
...But this is only the beginning of Axelrod's investigations...
...Dozens of other fascinating discoveries eventually emerged...
...Axelrod's cooperation theory also offers a model for many other historical developments...
...This pattern of cooperation was put on a broader level within European society when a small group of insiders--the Protestants--began to follow the same strategy...
...The first was the "nice" strategies (I would call them "optimistic")--the ones that assumed good will on the part of the other player and did not betray first...
...For centuries, centralists and statists have been able to dismiss the doctrine of laissez-faire by saying that nothing will happen if government does not "do something" in directing social action...
...It is a triumphant affirmation of the view of society painfully constructed by Adam Smith, and later elaborated by Ludwig yon Mises and Frederick A. Hayek--even though the author never seems to have heard of "Austrian economics," and seems totally unaware of its close relationship to his subject...
...The second was the "not nice" strategies, which were generally built around a plan for not cooperating, but shrewdly trying to betray the other player...
...The game has been floating around social psychology circles for about a decade...
...A recent favorite among social psychologists, the Prisoner's Dilemma is a mathematical model for a situation where two people find that both their efforts are required in order for either of them to succeed...
...Axelrod, however, misses this point completely--which is why he is going to be astonished if he ever encounters the Austrian school...
...What we call "capitalism," in fact, is really just voluntary cooperation in economics and other social efforts...
...He begins his chapter on politics by noting that, whenever he sets a group of students to playing the Prisoner's Dilemma for the first time, they inevitably respond to its frustrations by saying, "There ought to be a law against this...
...It always assumes good intentions on the part of the other player...
...If you want to succeed at the Prisoner's Dilemma, writes Axelrod, the first rule is: " D o n ' t be env i o u s . . , envy is self-destructive...
...The scoring is like this: Cooperate successfully, 3 points each...
...But Axelrod is also aware of the dangers that await any such small group that prospers through the cooperative ethic...
...Generally, both sides can do well, or both can do p o o r l y . . . In a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself...
...It's enough to make you want to start a civilization...
...But most of life is not a zero-sum game...
...Axelrod, I believe, has done it...
...Two people are caught and accused of a crime they have committed...
...betray the other successfully, 5 points...
...But no matter, it is all here...
...People are used to thinking about zero-sum transactions," he writes...
...A single cooperating individual trying to preach "niceness" and reciprocity to a population of "betrayers" is doomed to failure...
...Apparently not...
...If the other player defected, TIT FOR TAT "punishes" the other player by defecting on the next round--but only the next round...
...Moreover, when played over an evolutionary time sequence, the "not nice" strategies eventually faded into extinction, while the nice strategies all survived...
...Incredibly, although TIT FOR TAT compiled the highest cumulative score in both tournaments, it never won an individual encounter with another player...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
