C O O P E R A T I O N   8

The Future of Cooperation

For cooperation to evolve, there have to be enough cooperators who interact with one another on a sufficiently regular basis. Such "islands of cooperation," once established, can grow... but too small an island will sink beneath the waves of defectors.

One critical factor not addressed by any other commentator on Axelrod's work I've seen concerns being able to recognize other players. The Tit for Tat strategy depends on remembering what another player did on the immediately previous turn. But if the other player is anonymous, or is encountered only once, it's impossible to associate a history with that player. This leads either to cooperating with an unknown (and possibly being taken advantage of repeatedly) or defecting from lack of trust (and possibly missing an opportunity to create an environment of cooperation).

This takes on added relevance today. Not only are the streets and highways filled with persons whom we'll never see again--and who thus have no qualms about defecting (in other words, driving like jerks)--we are spending more time surfing the Web as anonymous entities than we once did sitting in the back yard talking with our neighbors. Our contacts with other players in the game of trust/don't-trust are more likely to be brief encounters with strangers: ephemeral and anonymous. Under such conditions, not only is it unlikely that new clusters of cooperative behavior will evolve, but even the maintenance of what cooperation there is becomes difficult. Trust breaks down.

How long can such a state of affairs last?

". . . perhaps the chief thesis of the book on The Fatal Conceit . . . is that the basic morals of property and honesty, which created our civilization and the modern numbers of mankind, was the outcome of a process of selective evolution, in the course of which always those practices prevailed, which allowed the groups which adopted them to multiply most rapidly (mostly at their periphery among people who already profited from them without yet having fully adopted them."
-- letter from Friedrich A. Hayek to Julian Simon, Nov. 6, 1981.

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The Future of Cooperation

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