Franz De Waal, author of Chimpanzee Politics, has a new book coming out, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. Robin Hanson went to see him speak and found De Waal oddly incapable of analyzing his own topic and seeing the dark side of cooperation:
One might argue that empathy is good because it promotes cooperation. But a striking experiment in the latest AER shows the dark side of cooperation; better cooperation within teams that fight each other can lead to far more destruction and waste.
In the one-on-one version of the experiment, subjects are paired and each side gets a budget of 1000 tokens, some of which can be spent fighting over a common prize of another 1000 tokens. That prize is distributed in proportion to tokens spent fighting for it. For example, if you spent 300 and your opponent spent 100 tokens fighting, then you’d get 750 and they’d get 250 of the prize tokens. Together with the 700 you didn’t spend fighting, you’d end up with 1450 tokens.
The one-shot Nash equilibrium here is for each side to spend 250 tokens fighting, and walk away with 1250; half of the prize is destroyed in the struggle. The same opponents interact for twenty (or 40) rounds, and if that allowed perfect coordination between the opponents, they’d each contribute 1 token to the fight and walk away with 1499; only 0.2% of the prize would be destroyed.
There was also a team-on-team version of the experiment. Four people on each side could contribute to their side’s fighting pot, and a 1000 token per person prize is again distributed in proportion to the relative size of the pots. Sharing a pot creates a free rider problem; each team member would rather that other members contribute more to the fight. This reduces the one-shot Nash fighting contributions to 63, so that each walks away with 1437; only 1/8 of the prize is destroyed in the struggle.
Finally they tried teams with internal punishment. Each token a team member spent punishing another would destroy three of that person’s tokens. If such punishment allowed teams to coordinate perfectly, we’d be back to one-on-one equilibria.
The actual experimental results are summarized in this figure:
In the one-on-one version, subjects were far more eager to fight, relative to one-shot Nash predictions, on average destroying all of the prize. They fought less as time passed, but even after forty rounds fought far more than Nash suggests. Free-riding did reduce team efforts, though only down to the Nash level for individuals. And punishment enabled teams to coordinate to destroy more than the whole prize, an effect that doesn’t seem to diminish with time.
So, relative to what simple uncoordinated self-interest would predict, humans are far more eager to fight each other. And while punishment does allow teams to coordinate internally, teams completely fail to coordinate with each other; instead they coordinate to fight so hard that they destroy more than what they fight over.