Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

often risk worse outcomes than those who search for mutual gains. Consider the
scenario of the “prisoner’s dilemma,” where two co-conspirators who committed
a crime are locked in separate cells. If each independently decides to betray his
partner in order to get a better deal for himself, both are convicted. If only one
defects, the other is convicted. If both stay silent, both are acquitted. To evaluate
the best strategy in a multi-round version of this dilemma, researchers organized
a computer tournament and invited experts to submit a strategy. The winning
strategy was “tit-for-tat” (Axelrod 1984), which instructed the computer to begin
by cooperating but to respond in kind if the other side defected. In this highly
adversarial context, conditional cooperation best served each individual’s selfinterest.
Similarly, in negotiation, seeking to expand the pie can serve the self-interest
of both parties. Economic theory describes the relationship between individual
and joint interest using the “Pareto curve” (Raiffa, 1982), illustrated on the next
page, where the y axis represents party A’s satisfaction with the outcome and the
x axis represents party B’s satisfaction. In a traditional bargaining situation, A and
B each present an opening position that exclusively serves their own interests
(denoted by the circles labeled “A’s Position” and “B’s Position”). If A and B
agree to compromise by cutting their demands in half, they end up approximately
at outcome Z, but outcome Z is suboptimal. If A and B had investigated mutual
gains, they could have reached an agreement lying in the grey region, where
either or both would have been individually better off than at Z. The curve on the
graphic represents the limit on mutual gains. Any outcome lying on the curve is
a “Pareto-optimal outcome” — an agreement that cannot be improved upon by
either party without disadvantaging the other.
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