Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

504 | HOW THE MIND WORKSstripped the dilemma to its essentials and awarded points to a strategyfor the equivalent of minimizing jail time. A simple strategy called tit-fortat—cooperateon the first move, and then do what your partner did onthe move before—beat sixty-two other strategies. Then they ran an artificiallife simulation in which each strategy "reproduced" in proportion toits winnings and a new round-robin took place among the copies of thestrategies. They repeated the process for many generations and foundthat the Tit for Tat strategy took over the population. Cooperativenesscan evolve when the parties interact repeatedly, remember each other'sbehavior, and reciprocate it.As we saw in Chapters 5 and 6, people are good at detecting cheatersand are fitted with moralistic emotions that prompt them to punish thecheaters and reward the cooperators. Does that mean that tit-for-tatunderlies the widespread cooperation we find in the human species? Itcertainly underlies much of the cooperation we find in our society. Cashregistertapes, 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 asthieving employees, are sometimes charged with crimes, but more oftenthey are simply cut off from further reciprocation, that is, fired. Similarly,the businesses that cheat their customers soon lose them. Footloose jobapplicants, fly-by-night businesses, and strangers calling with "investmentopportunities" are often discriminated against because they looklike 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 privatelyremember the most recent Christmas gifts and dinner-partyinvitations and calculate the proper way to reciprocate.Does all this accounting come from our alienation and bourgeois valuesin a capitalist society? One of the fondest beliefs of many intellectualsis that there are cultures out there where everyone shares freely. Marxand Engels thought that preliterate peoples represented a first stage inthe evolution of civilization called primitive communism, whose maximwas "From each according to his abilities, to each according to hisneeds." Indeed, people in foraging societies do share food and risk. Butin many of them, people interact mainly with their kin, so in the biologist'ssense they are sharing with extensions of themselves. Many culturesalso have an ideal of sharing, but that means little. Of course I willproclaim how great it is for you to share; the question is, will J sharewhen my turn comes?