Game Theory, News and Community
March 19th, 2008 | by Brad King |One of the topics we cover in my classes is game theory, particularly the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If you don’t want to click on the link, here is a basic overview:
Two people are separated and questioned, but offered the same deal. If you turn on the other person - you go free and the other person goes to jail for an extended time. If you keep silent - you both go to jail, but for a very short time. If you both turn on each other - you go to jail for a time somewhere in between.
In other words, it behooves you to both keep quiet since you don’t know what the other person is doing. However, the egoistic viewpoint we all have often leads people to immediately turn.
Okay, so what the hell does that have to do with the news?
There is a new Harvard study out today that found when the game is played repeatedly, those who cooperated with each other succeed more often. In other words, negativity was good in the short term but bad in the long term.
In Nowak’s experiment, the students played more than 8,000 games of prisoner’s dilemma, using dimes to reward and punish. The normal game of prisoner’s dilemma gives two players two options: cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, each ends up winning a dime. If both defect, each gets nothing. If one cooperates and the other defects, the cooperative player loses 20 cents and the defector wins 30 cents…
…When Nowak compared how much money people earned or lost in the long run, there was a noticeable correlation between punishment and overall money. The players who punished their opponents the least, or not at all, made the most money. Those who punished the most made the least money.
This is really important for people trying to build a community to remember for two reasons:
1) communities need to have a rules-based system in place that allows for the prisoner’s dilemma to play out - in other words, it must be community governed so that there is a sense of history attached to it. If you have one person meting out the punishment, reputations are arbitrarily made (which means, if I don’t like you and I’m the administrator, you’re in trouble; if the community doesn’t like you, you can find yourself shunned, which is worse than banned);
and 2) you can’t act with a heavy hand on those who are building your community.Remember, you make less money with punishment.
And I can say that as I wandered SXSW this year, I was keeping an eye out for people who were supernodes. Some are simply because of where they work, although many of them do not know that. (I experienced that when I was at Wired News - I used to joke that I should legally change my name to Brad From Wired, since that was how I was introduced for nearly three years.)
But the true supernodes, people like Gary Vanerchuk, who goes a hundred miles-per-hour and doesn’t always hear what you have to say — but never in the short time that I saw him did he respond negatively. It was like a good improv actor. He just went with you.
These are the people you seek out, the ones who generate results because of their cooperation.
