Month: May 2018

Hand or fist

My first bicycle flat tire was a painful lesson in game theory. My friend, Vaughn, and I were riding our late 1960’s stingrays in looping figure eights interrupted with spontaneous wheelies in the street in front of my house, when one of us got the idea that we should play a game of chicken, James Dean style. So, we squared off on opposite ends of the block and rode our bikes directly at each other at full speed, each of us wearing hell-bent looks of determination (bicycle helmets weren’t a thing back in 1969). Neither of us was going to give an inch. And neither of us did. Our front tires hit dead-on at a combined speed of impact that was probably well over 20 miles per hour. Both of us ended up in the street several feet from ground zero, with our bikes lying in a tangled pile, wheels still spinning. In my time-yellowed, frame-jumping, Kodak Instamatic Super 8-quality memory replay of the crash, I can still clearly see my tire rip itself open across the axle bolt extending beyond Vaughn’s front fork. Neither of us was hurt beyond the expected asphalt burns and minor bruises, but I was angry. My bike was out of commission until dad got home and could fix it. And, in my eight-year-old mind, it was obviously Vaughn’s fault. He should have yielded.

Thirty-five years later I was at a Catholic college, team teaching a junior level interdisciplinary college class pretentiously titled “The Human Condition.” We had a guest lecturer, an economics professor, speaking to the class about game theory. He had the class play a game he called the “hand or fist game.” The rules were simple; he would ask students to raise their hand in one of two postures: open hand or closed fist. On the screen was a payoff matrix showing the contingent payoffs for raising an open hand if the majority of the students also raised an open hand and if the majority raised a fist, etc. The matrix was set up so that if the majority raised an open hand, everyone raising an open hand would get $5 and those who raised a fist would get $8. But if the majority raised a fist, then those who raised an open hand got nothing and those who raised a fist got $2. Students were told that the game would repeat through multiple rounds, and that the goal was, obviously, to amass as much money as possible. Clearly, the best long-term strategy for everyone is to cooperate and raise an open hand, where everyone would get $5 each time. But, as long as the majority keeps following the open hand strategy, those who raise a fist will clean up. After only a few rounds the vast majority of students were raising fists, and it was clear that open hand was a sucker’s bet; from that point on, raising a closed fist was the rational choice.

I had participated in this demonstration on a couple occasions in the past, and each time I noticed that, even after several rounds, long after it was clear that open hand was a sucker’s bet, a small number of students continued to raise an open hand. And they did so knowing full well that their payoff would be zero. Why is that? Why would a handful of students continue to choose an option that was guaranteed to lose?

First, it is clear that—economic theories aside—humans are not rational decision makers or optimizers, or anything of the sort. We are primates with sophisticated evolved social propensities. And I know that psychologists—myself included—would want to point out that there are social payoffs for continuing with the open hand that are unique to the situation, and that for some of the students these social payoffs, in the context of a lecture hall filled with their peers, likely outweigh the imaginary monetary payoffs of the game. But perhaps there is something more going on here as well. Perhaps humans, at their core, are noncompetitive, and more specifically, perhaps competition of this sort is something that only emerges in artificial situations where some kind of restriction of resources or limitation of access has been imposed.

Nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographies of traditional hunter-gatherers strongly suggest that cooperation, not competition, is the default assumption. Tell a hunter-gatherer that you want to play a game, and they will expect that the two of you will be working together, on the same team, as it were, rather than working against each other. It may well be that cooperation is an evolved expectation for our species, and that competition, at least the type of competition found among the civilized, has to be taught, socially reinforced, and enforced through systemic power differentials in order to countermand or overwrite the cooperative default.

Competitive games in previous iterations of civilization often had life and death consequences. The Romans had their circuses; the Aztecs had their ball games. Competition seems to be built into agricultural societies, societies with a long history of domestication, societies with a long history of hierarchical power relations and socially-mediated and unequally distributed access to resources. But if you look at band society, at foraging hunter-gatherers, you find that competition—where it exists at all—is usually a far more lighthearted affair. Modern-day hunter-gatherers (with a few rule-proving exceptions such as the Yanomamo) appear to enjoy games of chance far more so than games involving direct competition. In fact, overt competition can be extremely corrosive for egalitarian foragers, and hunter-gatherers have complex social leveling mechanisms to guard against competitive interpretations of hunting success, for example.

Authentic human lifestyles are based on an economy of abundance. Each member of society has open and easy access to all the knowledge and resources necessary to satisfy their own needs. Civilization is based on an economy of restriction in which each individual member is entirely dependent on others—and on the system itself—for access to knowledge and resources. Access in civilization has been turned into a zero-sum game in which each person is vying for their piece of a purposely limited pie, and the more pie I get, the less is available for you. In authentic human culture, it is a game of mutual enrichment. Cooperation is entirely optional (by definition, I suppose), but when we cooperate, together we get more than the sum of what we each walk away with when we are forced to compete.