How the Mind Works - michaeljgoodnight.com

504 | HOW THE MIND WORKS
stripped the dilemma to its essentials and awarded points to a strategy
for the equivalent of minimizing jail time. A simple strategy called tit-fortat—cooperate
on the first move, and then do what your partner did on
the move before—beat sixty-two other strategies. Then they ran an artificial
life simulation in which each strategy "reproduced" in proportion to
its winnings and a new round-robin took place among the copies of the
strategies. They repeated the process for many generations and found
that the Tit for Tat strategy took over the population. Cooperativeness
can evolve when the parties interact repeatedly, remember each other's
behavior, and reciprocate it.
As we saw in Chapters 5 and 6, people are good at detecting cheaters
and are fitted with moralistic emotions that prompt them to punish the
cheaters and reward the cooperators. Does that mean that tit-for-tat
underlies the widespread cooperation we find in the human species? It
certainly underlies much of the cooperation we find in our society. Cashregister
tapes, punch clocks, train tickets, receipts, accounting ledgers,
and the other accoutrements of transactions that do not rely on the
"honor system" are mechanical cheater-detectors. The cheaters, such as
thieving employees, are sometimes charged with crimes, but more often
they are simply cut off from further reciprocation, that is, fired. Similarly,
the businesses that cheat their customers soon lose them. Footloose job
applicants, fly-by-night businesses, and strangers calling with "investment
opportunities" are often discriminated against because they look
like they are playing a one-shot rather than an iterated game of cooperation,
and so are immune to tit-for-tat. Even moderately good friends privately
remember the most recent Christmas gifts and dinner-party
invitations and calculate the proper way to reciprocate.
Does all this accounting come from our alienation and bourgeois values
in a capitalist society? One of the fondest beliefs of many intellectuals
is that there are cultures out there where everyone shares freely. Marx
and Engels thought that preliterate peoples represented a first stage in
the evolution of civilization called primitive communism, whose maxim
was "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his
needs." Indeed, people in foraging societies do share food and risk. But
in many of them, people interact mainly with their kin, so in the biologist's
sense they are sharing with extensions of themselves. Many cultures
also have an ideal of sharing, but that means little. Of course I will
proclaim how great it is for you to share; the question is, will J share
when my turn comes?