NARR: When should a person cooperate?
When should a person be selfish?
What about nations?
And how does science play a role?
Robert Axelrod is a political scientist
who uses game theory
to study human behavior.
AXELROD: The Cuban Missle Crisis happening while I was in college
looking around for something useful to do with mathematics
certainly had an influence on me.
I thought this is nuts that people would be willing
to risk hundreds of millions of lives for
where these missiles are based when it didn't matter where they were based.
I thought, hmm maybe there's something to understand here that isn't obvious.
NARR: Axelrod became intrigued by the prisoner's dilemma --
a classic game theory scenario involving two threatened players.
Each can choose self-preservation at the expense of the other.
AXELROD: So I thought of the idea of having people submit
computer programs to play a game that's very simple
but represents the problem of conflict between making short-run gains by being selfish
and seeking longer-term gains from cooperating with others.
So I was surprised when the simplest of all the strategies submitted was the one
that did the best.
NARR: Known as tit-for-tat, a player cooperates in the beginning
then does what the opposing player did on the previous move.
Axelrod investigated other strategies
of cooperation in the real world.
In World War I they had something on the Western Front
called the live-and-let-live system where the British and French on one side
and the Germans on the other would often do things like
shoot their artillery between the trench lines, not on the trench lines.
NARR: His book, The Evolution of Cooperation,
proposed the role of forgiveness in conflict resolution
and included a landmark article co-authored
with evolutionary biologist, Bill Hamilton.
AXELROD: The one important modification is if there is some
possibility of misunderstanding then you should be somewhat more
forgiving once in a while.
Well I was one of the forty winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search,
which later became the Intel Talent Search,
and they declared us to be the 40 most promising young scientists.
I follow my nose which is to say,
I scan things widely, but I see something
new, I'll try to understand it. So it's being open to new stimuli.