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Self-Interest
The prisoner's dilemma assumes that the players are
selfish; that is, they do not care what happens to the other
player. This assumption is not always true. Sometimes people
do worry about others. Suppose, for example, that the two
prisoners are fellow revolutionaries dedicated to the ideals
of their cause, or they are husband and wife. In these
cases, even with the payoffs given in the first
table, it is unlikely that either prisoner will confess.
Each prisoner in these cases considers not just what will
happen to him as a result of his decision, but also what
will happen to the other prisoner.
However, one should not argue that "good" motives
necessarily lead to good results. Suppose that there is hard
evidence that links two criminals to a crime and that each
cares a great deal about the other. If neither confesses,
both may serve ten years. Under these circumstances, each
may confess to the crime, claiming that he alone was
responsible in an effort to help his fellow prisoner. But if
both try to help the other by admitting guilt, they both may
end up serving more time than if each had maintained
silence. Of course, this would not happen if they could
communicate and plan their strategies, but often in life
both information and communication are lacking. "Good"
motives with poor knowledge can result in harm to the group
welfare.
If one ignores problems of information and knowledge, a
conclusion one can draw from the stories about prisoners is
that there are two ways for groups (including that largest
group, the nation) to get good results. Groups can take
motivations or goals as given and try to find incentives
(payoffs) that yield desired results, or groups can take
incentives as given and try to find motivations or goals
that yield desired results. However, a closer look at the
assumption of self-interest suggests that the problems of
information and knowledge cannot be ignored, and that they
place important limitations on the ways groups can
organize.
In discussing self-interest, one must distinguish between
people's actions and motives in small-group situations and
in large-group situations. In small-group situations, as in
a family, tribe, or a pre-industrial village, self-interest
seems to be only one of many motives determining actions. At
least as important are motives such as loyalty, duty,
affection, and compassion. In such situations narrow
self-interest-- ignoring the interests of others--is a vice.
Small groups often depend on selfless motives to get good
results. The most basic of groups, the family, could not
exist without selfless motives. In a family, good intentions
usually lead to good results because family members have
extensive knowledge about each other. In small groups,
people often consider how their actions affect others in the
group.
It is dangerous to assume that large groups can be
organized in the same way as small groups. As groups get
larger, more and more knowledge is needed if good motives
are to lead to good results, and less and less is generally
available. In addition, as groups grow larger, those
affected by a person's actions change from identifiable
people to anonymous strangers and this can affect
behavior.
When one makes a distinction between small groups and
large groups, one finds that the assumptions needed to get
"self-interested" behavior are extremely weak. In fact, it
is possible to assume that people are perfectly
altruistic--they care only about the well-being of
others--and end up with behavior that appears
self-interested. One need only assume that the altruism is
very strong toward the small groups with which people are
associated (such as families or friends) and weak or
nonexistent toward strangers (the large-group world). For
example, a man who is interested in the well-being of his
family acts in a way that, as far as the large group is
concerned, may be indistinguishable from actions motivated
by narrow self-interest. He will demand as much pay as he
can get for his work and will try to pay the lowest price he
can for the goods he purchases. An appeal made to him to
work at a lower pay for the common good is likely to be
resisted because it will harm the group he is most
interested in helping, his family.
Copyright
Robert Schenk
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