As a species, humans don't live in isolation - we interact using cooperation, coordination, communication and competition. This entry looks at how these characteristics of interaction have been studied and some of the insights this research has brought about.
In a perfect world, cooperation would be a pre-requisite in that, the act of working together would bring about consistent harmony for the common good. The problem with our imperfect world is that we are individuals living in a collective society, each with our own needs and wants; cooperation inevitably involves some sacrifice to ourselves that may affect us achieving our own goals. The extent to which cooperation occurs appears to be reliant on several other components. Cooperation, (obviously) requires more than 1 participant, hence coordination between 'agents' is necessary which is facilitated (or hindered) by communication and to spice things up, we mustn't forget that we people have a propensity toward competition, be that to win or even to survive.
Game Theory analyses the interaction between rational agents but, as we've already seen, people often don't behave 'rationally'. The rational outcome of the Ultimatum game (see page 162 of Hardman for details) suggests both agents will act in a way that maximises self interests, oddly enough this doesn't appear to be the case however, peoples irrationality appears to be consistent. Having done the math and discovered discrepencies, its time to ask "how do people behave in reality?" - enter the realms of Behavioural Game Theory.
The Prisoners Dilemma (p. 162, Hardman) attempts to put theory in real time context as does the Public Goods Game. It appears from such 'games' that people cooperate more than rational game theory predicts, but not as well as they might in a perfect world; when the temptation to cease cooperation becomes too great to resist by one agent the other retaliates and both agents 'lose'. (Sounds a lot like real life to me!) Rational Theory is grounded on a single cause and effect, in games terms: 'one shot'. In real life seldom do we make one decision which has no effect on future decisions or has no impact on our current status, be that financial, emotional, social etc. In light of this it has been suggested that participants approach 'games' as they would in real life; anticipating repeating sitations and balancing losses and gains against prospective losses and gains and has opened a whole new can of discovery in Folk Theorem.
In real life though, it would seem that people do not consider all the options and consequences (sound familiar?), but experiments have shown that people actually cooperate more the less thought they give (Roch et al 2000), perhaps analytical thought is not as good as its cracked up to be?
Game theory assumes no interaction between participants, rarely is that a situation in real life. In reality we coordinate our efforts, primarily through communication. Balancing our needs with others in order to come to a mutually aggreeable conclusion, indeed communication has been shown to be a factor in effective cooperation (Tazelaar et al 2004). Game Theory can be considered a 'false' situation, as is the argument against many 'experimental situations'. As mentioned, we have individual needs which we aim to fulfill; these needs are driven by a multitude of motivation factors such as fear, greed and social value orientation. These motivations are in turn influenced by social and emotional factors such as culture, economic status, trust and generosity (which are circularly dependant on each other). Thus explicit and implicit communication is essential to effective interactions. Of course communication can also be used to decrease cooperation and increase competition in order to fulfill 'my' needs over 'yours'.
It seems to me that despite the obvious pitfalls of human nature when comapared to analytical thinking, we have 'devised' methods of combining rationality with fallability in a reasonably successful manner.
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