The Evolution of Trust

Sorry, I truly forget whether I have posted about this, but a friend sent it to me again. I remember going through the entire game and finding it very interesting, and also a good explanation for trust. All sorts of people talk about how empathy was necessary to build tribe cohesion, etc. so that people could trust each other to stop killing each other and cooperate, but I wonder. Try the game out and let me know what you think.

Also, don't forget I'm in Oregon in May and Hawaii in June, if anyone wants to meet up.

Here is the game: http://ncase.me/trust/

For some background on game theory, including perhaps the most popular, the Prisoner's Dilemma:

Trust as Explained by Game Theory

This was an interesting page/exercise sent to me via Twitter applying the concepts of game theory to the generation and maintenance of trust.

People no longer trust each other. Why? And how can we fix it? An interactive guide to the game theory of trust: http://ncase.me/trust/

It takes like 20-30 minutes to complete. At first I was turned off a little by the arbitrary constraints of the game, but they end up dealing with that issue later on -- so patience pays off! I've seen these models before, but it was interesting to apply it more directly to trust. Also, I hadn't seen the addition of mistakes/misunderstandings into the model before too. That has already changed the way I view others and the world. For instance (this might not make sense until you do the exercise), a friend of mine recently had an Amazon package fail to be delivered. She assumed that it was some shady neighbors stealing the package and was going to stop having any packages delivered, even though she has had like 20 successful package deliveries so far. I encouraged her to keep trying until she has another package go missing, just in case there was a mistake or other one off occurrence that shouldn't necessarily change her game playing strategy. It's a risky strategy maybe, but in her case she has no other convenient alternative for package delivery.

Without really remembering, I had applied essentially the "Diamond Rule" to this game. I think this worked ok (and probably works better with actual people than bots?), but it is true that in a situation in which there is a mistake, it can also compound a mistake into a global loss.

There's that phrase "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me". But this game suggests a more optimal rule, when mistakes are factored in: "Fool me once, ok, I take it on the chin. Fool me twice, shame on you with punishment."

Conned

A reader recently suggested a reason why people are so upset to learn that someone they know is a sociopath: "The normal person figures out they have been dealing with a sociopath only after they have been screwed and they see that the person they thought they were dealing with never existed. The distaste is both for the deception and also recognition that they were "had"- never pleasant."

It reminded me of this Radio Lab episode "What's Left When You're Right," which starts off with a segment on the game show Golden Balls. The end segment to each episode ends with a classic game theory prisoner's dilemma. So the deal is that if they both choose split, they split the money. If one chooses steal, the other split, the person who steals gets the money. If they both choose steal, no one gets the money. This clip is one of the craziest versions of it:



To me, this seems like an easy choice. I would split, because unlike most prisoner's dilemmas where it is much worse to cooperate/split when the other person defects/steals (20 years in prison for you) than to both defect/steal (10 years in prison for both of you), you end up with nothing if both of you split. The game show gets to keep its money. To me, that seems like the bigger waste. I would rather ensure that someone besides the show got the money, even if it meant giving it all to another person. And I don't actually get upset when someone gets one over on me. People manipulate me all of the time. I've been led into some pretty terrible situations (seen or heard a couple of my worst media appearances?), been conned, cheated, or whatever, but it doesn't really bother me. If anything, I'm often impressed, or at least try to learn something from the situation. (Although if it was less of a one time thing and more of a continuing power struggle, I'd probably try to figure out some way to hit them back).

I don't think most people think this way, in fact the Radio Lab episode tries to explain why so many people choose split (apart from the obvious greed) by interviewing previous contestants. The interviewees seemed to suggest that their main motivation in stealing was to avoid the feeling of being conned, tricked, or otherwise taken advantage of.

The problem with that is extreme efforts to avoid being "conned" often end up hurting yourself and others. The whole Cold War was basically built on this fear. From a New Yorker review of a book about nuclear almost disasters, "Nukes of Hazard":

On  January 25, 1995, at 9:28 a.m. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow. Below the screen was a row of buttons. This was the Russian “nuclear football.” By pressing the buttons, Yeltsin could launch an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. Russian nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers were on full alert. Yeltsin had forty-seven hundred nuclear warheads ready to go.

The Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov, had a football, too, and he was monitoring the flight of the missile. Radar showed that stages of the rocket were falling away as it ascended, which suggested that it was an intermediate-range missile similar to the Pershing II, the missile deployed by nato across Western Europe. The launch site was also in the most likely corridor for an attack on Moscow by American submarines. Kolesnikov was put on a hot line with Yeltsin, whose prerogative it was to launch a nuclear response. Yeltsin had less than six minutes to make a decision.

The Cold War had been over for four years. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned on December 25, 1991, and had handed over the football and the launch codes to Yeltsin. The next day, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. By 1995, though, Yeltsin’s popularity in the West was in decline; there was tension over plans to expand nato; and Russia was bogged down in a war in Chechnya. In the context of nuclear war, these were minor troubles, but there was also the fact, very much alive in Russian memory, that seven and a half years earlier, in May, 1987, a slightly kooky eighteen-year-old German named Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square. The humiliation had led to a mini-purge of the air-defense leadership. Those people did not want to get burned twice.

After tracking the flight for several minutes, the Russians concluded that its trajectory would not take the missile into Russian territory. The briefcases were closed. It turned out that Yeltsin and his generals had been watching a weather rocket launched from Norway to study the aurora borealis. Peter Pry, who reported the story in his book “War Scare” (1999), called it “the single most dangerous moment of the nuclear missile age.” Whether it was the most dangerous moment or not, the weather-rocket scare was one of hundreds of incidents after 1945 when accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction, or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons. 

Finally, Radio Lab discusses a contestant who comes up with a strategy that successfully avoids people's fear of being conned:



So I guess this explains why the people I've told myself about my diagnosis take it drastically better than the people that hear it from other sources? They feel like I've conned them? Here's the trick, though. You start indiscriminately telling people you're a sociopath and see if they still treat you well. 

Junk science

I often see sociopath research that by itself is not dubious, but the implications or the conclusions that the researchers draw from the evidence seems stretched, non sequitur, or wholly unsupported by the data. For instance, I wrote about research suggesting that the sociopath's corpus callosum is longer and thinner than the average person's brain, resulting in a faster rate of transfer of information between the two hemispheres of their brain. Rather than cite this as a possible advantage of the sociopath brain, researchers conjectured that this might explain why sociopaths have "less remorse, fewer emotions and less social connectedness." What? Maybe it's just my lack of understanding, but that conclusion doesn't seem to follow at all from the fact that sociopaths have a more efficient corpus callosum.

Sometimes the problem with the research or logic is the complete circularity of the research -- i.e. the tautology of the assertion people who manifest antisocial traits tend to behave antisocially. For instance, a new study found out that people who self-report that "what matters for me is the bottom line,"will behave more ruthlessly and selfishly in prisoner's dilemma style games:

The study involved normal undergraduate students around age 19. The students were divided into small groups and told to converse on a topic of their choice for 10 minutes. Then, they were separated and given a questionnaire to measure their psychopathic tendencies. The questionnaire asked them to rate their agreement with statements, such as"what matters for me is the bottom line," or "I am often angry in social situations." There are two kinds of psychopathy, but this study was looking at the classic "conniving and cold" psychopaths.

Next, the researchers had the students play a "prisoner's dilemma" game, in which each person was given a sum of money that they could keep for themselves or transfer to a partner, for whom it would be doubled. For example, both people would start with $3; they could either keep $3 or give $6 to their partner. If the game has several iterations, it is in both people's best interest to cooperate and give the money away, because both will receive $6 instead of $3. But if it's just a one-shot game, it's in a person's best interest to keep the $3 for himself or herself, as there can be no consequence of not cooperating. (This experiment involved a one-shot game, though participants weren't told that fact.)

The students who scored higher on the questionnaire (meaning they were more psychopathic) were more likely to betray their partner and keep the money for themselves if that partner interrupted them more frequently (a sign of disrespect). The more psychopathic students were also more likely to betray a partner with whom they appeared to have less in common, and were therefore less likely to see again. In other words, those with more psychopathic tendencies only cooperated if there was something in it for them.

The conclusion:

"Traits such as deceitfulness and conceitedness — as opposed to honesty and humility — involve a willingness to take advantage of others when the opportunity arises."

Hm.

Economics and sociopathy

I was talking to an economist friend recently. We were talking about how economics is not just a dismal science, but that economists have a pretty dismal view of human nature, possibly because economists themselves are not generally altruistic or prosocial? He told me that economists are different enough from the general population that economics researchers can't use economics undergraduate students for their experiments because they tend to give very different answers than the average person. Specifically he told me about a game where everyone chooses to either put in a black marble or a white marble in a bag. If you put in a white marble, you increase the overall size of the payout/pie, but you just have one piece of that pie. If you put in a black marble, you get two pieces of the pie, but of a smaller pie. The optimal result would be for everyone to put in white marbles, and a lot of people actually do put in white marbles either because of altruism or optimism or guilt or whatever else. Economists and economics students, however, almost always put in black marbles. My economist friend was using this as evidence that economists are not good people. And if this one scenario was the only thing you knew about economists, perhaps you could say that the results of the experiment are consistent with the economists-as-bad-people hypothesis too.

But I gave him another quick scenario to see how he would handle it: imagine that you are at war, just you and five other fellow soldiers, all standing around in a circle. A grenade gets launched into the middle of the circle. If someone jumps on the grenade, only one person dies. If no one jumps on the grenade, there's a 20% chance someone might die and everyone will suffer moderate to critical injuries. Everyone is equidistant from the grenade and has an equal opportunity to jump on the grenade. Before I tell you what he said, I want the sociopaths who are reading this to think what they would do.






So, I asked my economist friend what he would do and he immediately replied, "I would jump on the grenade." Of course he would. He's rational and cares about efficiency. He would be the type of person in the trolley problem to throw the switch and kill the one to save the five, and apparently that answer doesn't change even when he is the one who needs to die. I think his answer surprised even him, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he had convinced himself that economists are soulless or at the very least selfish (i.e., rationally self-interested). But there's nothing remotely selfish or even self-interested about jumping on the grenade.

The reason I knew that this example would "work" on him is that he and I think similarly and it's something that I think I might do too. I like efficiency, and it would be efficient to fall on the grenade. Also I like winning, and it would be "winning" to thwart the enemy. It would be powerful, to smother the force of such a powerful device with just my body. Also I'm impulsive and not particularly attached to life. I actually think that a lot of sociopaths would do the same for one or more of those reasons. In fact, and I wish there was some way to accurately test this, I predict that a higher percentage of sociopaths would jump on the grenade than non-sociopaths, if for nothing else than the indecision or paralyzing fear that a lot of non-sociopaths might experience -- by the time they got around to making the decision, it might be too late. These are just guesses, but I don't think it's crazy to think that sociopaths might be braver and more pro-social in certain situations than normal people, just like economists might be more selfless than the average person in certain situations.

Whether or not my prediction is correct, I think this example also illustrates how dangerous it is to perform a couple experiments in controlled situations and extrapolate the data far beyond those particular situations. Sloppy science writers (and even serious researchers) make this mistake all of the time, e.g. if sociopaths seem to not show empathy in one situation, it's easy to make the (apparently incorrect) presumption that they never feel empathy. The truth is context matters immensely and we only know a sliver of all there is to know about ourselves and others. 

Game theory

A reader writes about game theory:


I find that I approach life through classic game theory (even before I learned what game theory was). Everything in life is a series of pro's and con's; a constant evaluation of the better outcome. "Love" is the same way, regardless of limerence. I see the pro's and con's of being with a particular person over another person, or over being alone and choose accordingly; approaching marriage in the same fashion, of course. I am engaged, actually; she loves me, and I see no outright "con's" to being with her, I know her (by the same measure of being able to "peer into her soul" as from the blog), and I am generally happy with her presence. While I am not aware that she knows of my sociopathy (although, she is quite familiar with with my agitation towards people, preference to solitude, quiet and observant nature, etc.), I am also sure that should she label me as such, she would not cause me undue stress. That, finally, is one of the major things (a keystone "pro," if you will), is that whatever event I am weighing, I will most always choose the event likely to cause me less hassle and stress.

For me, not only is Game Theory one fashion of handling life, but the concept of compartmentalization.  As many people have commented, trying to keep everything in order (in regards to the lies, half-truths, manipulations, "games," etc.) would be exceedingly difficult.  And it would be, if the sociopath's mind operated as a normal person's.  Everything in my mind is organized sort of like folders and folder groups that you might find in, say, Windows Explorer; everything has its place.  When a situation presents itself, or I am with a certain friend(s), I simply "open" up that folder and behave accordingly.  When one's mind is organized in such a way that no thought co-mingles with others, you don't have the problem of "remembering all of the lies," because you have everything you need neatly stored away, waiting to be accessed at the right time.  This same concept of compartmentalization applies in all walks of life, whether it be love, friendships, work, etc.  Another quality of this is enabling oneself to keep track of friend circles and ensuring that none of these circles cross in any way; this can allow for you to more easily adapt to any number of given situations per friend circle: a different personality, find another lover (in addition to, or instead of, one you may already have).  I find that I am in many different circles, but almost as a ghost; I can walk in and out of these circles almost unnoticed and not missed.  I was once described by a teacher as, "a loner who is never alone."