C O O P E R A T I O N

Background

Why do we cooperate with one another?

Don't we do better personally when we take advantage of someone who tries to cooperate with us?

How can we justify cooperating when others don't?

It would seem that cooperation is for suckers. And yet there are examples of cooperation all around us: no single person could build a skyscraper, or fight a war, or agree to an international treaty. For all of these things (and many others) to happen, sufficient numbers of self-interested individual human beings must agree to cooperate even when cheating is easy. But why does this happen?

In the late 1970s a researcher named Robert Axelrod was studying the question of how cooperation can emerge in an uncooperative world. Given that in many real-world situations the payoff for taking advantage of others is greater than the reward for cooperation, how can the observed prevalence of cooperative behavior be explained?

Next:

The Prisoner's Dilemma

Resources

Published

Axelrod, Robert -- The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, 1984. Axelrod's first book directly on the subject of how cooperation can exist and grow amid exploitation. He has more recently written The Complexity of Cooperation, but I haven't yet had a chance to review that work.

Dawkins, Richard -- The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1989. Even though most of Dawkins's amazing first book can be read as a study of how cooperation can survive selfishness, Chapter 12 ("Nice Guys Finish First") actually discusses Axelrod's work.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. -- "The Prisoner's Dilemma: Computer Tournaments and the Evolution of Cooperation," Metamagical Themas, Bantam New Age, 1986, pp. 715-734. The estimable Douglas Hofstadter's collection of articles written for Scientific American includes one piece from May of 1983 on Axelrod's work. (This is, in fact, how I first came to be aware of Axelrod and his experiments in cooperation.)

WWW

Prisoner's Dilemma an in-depth look at various forms of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

The Complexity of Cooperation a study of Robert Axelrod's more recent paper, The Complexity of Cooperation.

Social Dilemmas more on the question of evolving cooperation.

Artificial Life Online a starting site for the exploration of research into "artificial life" (sometimes shortened to "alife").

Yahoo Flocking Examples some fascinating on-line examples of alife.

Background

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