Recently I have came across the book titled Why Society is a Complex Matter by Phillip Ball (Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012).
Chapter 8 of the book is titled Love Thy Neighbour: How to Foster Cooperation. Ball states:
“Society is a collaborative effort: it works to the extent that we can get along with our neighbours, agree on common goals, and accept shared responsibilities….Yet that seems to conflict with the supposed Darwinian imperative of competition, in which every individual is out for themselves. Long before Darwin’s theory, some philosophers insisted that the only way to avoid the rapacious state of affairs that followed from humankind’s greed and desire for power over others was to impose the restraining authority of the state. Others had more faith in humanity: they felt that God had made people inherently good and rational, and that this for the most part guarantees that our relations with our neighbours are civilized.”
Ball goes on to describe how to resolve the dilemma. He states:
“This is the basic problem for societies based on the principle of unenforced cooperation: they are ripe for exploitation by those who put self before community… This dilemma has been recognized for centuries, but it was framed in a formal, scientific way in the 1950s within the context of the nascent discipline of game theory, which seeks a description of behaviour in which individuals anticipate how others will act towards them. The classic model system for investigating cooperation and defection is a ‘game’ called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which two players are presented with the choice of whether to cooperate or not (that is, to ‘defect’), with the temptation that, while mutual cooperation is a good outcome for both players, unilateral defection has an even better payoff for the defector. A rational analysis of the options indicates that, regardless of what the other player does, it is always better to defect. Yet this must then lead to both prisoners defecting, which is a worse outcome than if they both cooperate.”
Ball goes on to describe the Tit-for-Tat strategy of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. He then describes the large amount of complexity in this simple model. Ball later states:
“If a genetic predisposition towards altruism in humans did evolve in the way that these game-theoretical models imply, this does not necessarily imply a steady historical progression away from violence and towards cooperation. One agent-based model of group behaviour in early humans suggests that altruistic behaviour might initially have been parochial – concentrated within groups – and have been stimulated by inter-group conflict. If that’s true, our genetic legacy might simultaneously predispose us both to cooperation and war. This somewhat pessimistic view does not have to provide a prescription for the future, however, for humans are highly susceptible to social learning: to evolving cultural modes of behaviour that can overcome our baser impulses.”
Ball ends the chapter by stating:
“Nonetheless, the strong resonances already apparent between the predictions and outcomes of cooperative games and real-world behaviour – for example, the benefits of solidarity for altruism, the need for deterrents to free-riders, and the collective evolution of norms of mutual help or selfishness – suggest that certain social traits might already be captured to some degree in these models, and that there is already a sound foundation on which to build a deeper understanding of how societies succeed or fail in developing a cohesive and collaborative community.”
I find the book Why Society is a Complex Matter intriguing and particularly enjoyed the piece in chapter 8 of which I have highlighted above.