This is part 8 of a series of blog posts. Please start with part 1 first.
Our modern world was created by standardizing countless processes. This allowed us to build machines for many of the resulting simple and clearly defined tasks. By structuring our society with a rigid set of simple behavioral rules („the law“) we could reduce friction between individuals and groups enormously and limit the need for communication to a minimum: today, I can order a t-shirt with 2-3 clicks of my computer mouse, without talking to anybody.
But what happens exactly if we do this?
Let’s look at a classic example from game theory: the iterated prisoner’s dilemma „game“ (it’s in fact rather a gedankenexperiment).
Interestingly, the optimal strategy to play the game depends critically on how many times the game is played (by the same 2 players):
- If we play it only once, non-cooperative behavior is always optimal.
- If we play it an unknown number of times, a strategy which tries to achieve a state of mutual cooperation (like the „tit for tat“ strategy) is preferable.
- If we play a specific and previously known number of games, this tendency to cooperate collapses completely [1]!
Our globalized society allows us to approach any individual on the planet by email. If we look at the content of our email SPAM folder we easily understand (1.).
(2.) shows how cooperative behavior can emerge for the mutual benefit of both players by building trust.
But (3.) is the really interesting case: if we change the setting from „we will play any number of games between 10 and 30“ to „we will play exactly 20 games“ (what seems to be a subtle change) the optimal strategy changes completely from predominantly cooperative to entirely non-cooperative.
The problem is, that our simplifications allow us to perfectly calculate our moves. The „Nine men's morris“ game - for instance - is so simple, that perfect play from both players always results in a draw. Therefore, the optimal move can be clearly calculated in every possible situation of the game. This is not the case for „Go“, where even intuition has its merits.
In a society with complex structure, non-cooperative behavior is always risky. Harming others can always backfire in unexpected ways. But in a simple society this might often not be the case. Nowadays it is often possible to think all possible moves to the end and come to the conclusion that harming others is actually risk free.
Some people blame game theory itself (or at least its application to social problems) for the misery. But this makes no sense: if a company makes losses, it's not the arithmetic used in the accounting departement which should be blamed.
This relation between simplicity/computability and incentives for non-cooperative behavior has a huge impact on another human trait: our ability to express emotions. Emotions have interesting properties:
- They are very hard to control deliberately
- They are very hard to hide
- They are usually associated with a clearly defined and well known behavior (like anger -> aggression, love -> care etc.).
One plausible explanation for their purpose is that they help „building trust“. They allow our social environment to assess our internal state with certainty and predict our behavior in certain important situations. This happens for the benefit of the whole community: if we express fear, everybody should see this clearly and trust us that we feel in danger - because a huge grizzly bear might be following us.
But what happens, if we make all these ancient, „pre-wired“ behavior patterns obsolete by turning our world into a rather simple machine? Emotions were „designed“ by evolution for a mostly cooperative society, but our current world is extremely competitive. Therefore the behavior patterns associated with emotions have often become ineffective. In a competitive society it is often beneficial to hide emotions (the „poker face“), to be „cool“, to make it difficult for others to predict our moves.
Therefore we are often harming ourselves if we act based on emotions. If a man says something like „my wife is very emotional“ he is - sadly - not praising her: he rather wants to express his view that she is „irrational“ and therefore „difficult“.
These changes in the way society functions clearly gave a huge advantage to people who are particularly good at suppressing their emotions (or even don't have any!). It’s definitely not surprising that many of the most powerful people on this planet are actually dangerous sociopaths.
But there are also implications for the rest of us: as emotions help to build trust, their diminished use reinforces society's tendency to become more non-cooperative (cooperation requires trust).
Other major sources of problems are modern media. Emotions are designed to make other humans behavior predictable. As we have seen, they are very hard to fake in real live. But media allow us to tailor emotions to produce a certain effect in the audience. But if we instrumentalize them like this, they become a dangerous weapon. Furthermore, media often must communicate events which are clearly beyond human emotional capacity (e.g. horrors of war). All this has lead to the requirement that good journalism must be fact-bound and unemotional. But this kind of filtering can be very dangerous too: a war report consisting mostly of statistics about the number of bombs dropped might not lead to the same actions as an image of a wounded child from the enemy group [2].
The communication of honest emotions is essential to enable trust and compassion.
It’s a vicious circle: the more we suppress emotional communication, the less compassionate we get. This increases violence and hate. This seduces people to weaponize emotions further. And even those few journalists who want to present unfiltered emotional material to the public face great challenges: the emotional intensity of many current events is simply too extreme for most people.
It seems that we have trapped ourselves: we can no longer bear to look at our world without the emotional sunglasses on. And this slowly turns all of us into creatures of the dark.
Maybe it's time to take them off anyway, endure the pain and act based on unfiltered reality.
Please continue here with part 9 of this series.
[1] It’s a recursive process. It’s - of course - better to be non-cooperative in the last game. But from this follows that it is also a good idea in the game before,…., and so on.
[2] E.g. the impact of the fotos from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam
Image: Shutterstock / ArtMari