You Can Be Selfish and Still Save the World

Someone Please Tell Donald Trump

In June 2017, The United States quit the Paris agreement, perhaps the most important attempt to save our planet. Although it is indeed frustrating, Donald Trump, the “America First” president, shouldn’t be blamed entirely for not cooperating.

Not cooperating means not only to walk away from an international agreement, but also to lie on our time sheets, to freeride in our group projects, or to take all the money in the Golden Balls TV show. Trump’s action is just one of these luring decisions that are selfish but understandable. Life is after all a game that we are all trying to win right?

The problem behind our failure to cooperate is a myth that is present within even the best of us, a myth derived from a misconception about cooperation. So, what exactly is this myth, and more importantly, how can debunking it help us save the planet?

The Rational Betrayal: Prisoner’s dilemma

With Game Theory we may rationalize this eagerness to not cooperate, or in the theory ’s jargon, to “betray”. Let’s examine a classic Game Theory scenario called the prisoner’s dilemma: two suspects, kept in separate cells, are each confronted with a choice: to confess or not to confess, to cooperate together or to betray each other.

If a suspect agrees to confess (betray), he will be rewarded with a shorter sentence regardless of the choice of his fellow suspect. On the other hand, if he refuses to confess (cooperate), but the other suspect agrees, a double cross will cause the naive non-confessor a bitter 10-year sentence while the confessor enjoys his sweet freedom.

So, if both suspects attempt to minimize their individual prison time, they are then expected to confess, to betray each other. As a result, both of them will receive a punitive 8-year sentence. Their self-preserving decisions ironically lead them to the worst outcome in terms of collective interests.

In the Paris agreement, relevant countries face similar situations to the prisoners’. They can either reduce their pollution to save the planet, or they can quit and enjoy the economic benefits. Unsurprisingly, Trump quit, and the consequences are looming over all of us.

The Myth of Rational Betrayal

There are some people who do value something more than their individual interests. Compared to the selfish people who only value their own interests, selfless people also value the interests of other people. Although few people are selfless to the extreme that makes them indifferent about themselves, those moderately selfless people are still willing to cooperate for the benefit of collective interests.

Unfortunately, even these selflessly cooperative people may fall into a myth generated by our previous (incomplete) analysis of the prisoner’s dilemma. I call it the myth of rational betrayal.

The myth goes like this: Because the sole reason to cooperate is selflessness, the only rational choice for selfish people is to betray. Therefore, in a conflict between interest, there will only be selfless cooperators and selfish betrayers. This simply is not true.

The myth of rational betrayal doesn’t stop selfless people from cooperating, but it does limit the argument for cooperation. If we fall into this myth, the only way to make selfish betrayers cooperate is to urge them to be selfless.

So can we simply urge Trump to abandon his selfishness and instead cooperate to save the planet? Probably not. At the core of this myth is the idea that the only way to persuade people to cooperate is to persuade them that it is morally right, but this rarely works.

Luckily, there’s another argument.

An Objective Argument for Cooperation

The origin of the myth of rational betrayal stems from the prisoner’s dilemma, but our analysis is incomplete. By looking at the full picture of the prisoner’s dilemma, we can debunk this betrayal-inducing myth. When the game comes to a longer time span, “iterated prisoner’s dilemma”, cooperation is rational not only to the selfless but also to the selfish.

In the 1980s, scientists held a contest among different computer programs. In the contest programs competed with each other in iterated prisoner’s dilemma scenarios. The winner was a program named “tit for tat” with only two principles. Surprisingly, the principles were based on cooperation.

• Nice: default on cooperation unless betrayed
• Retaliating: betray only when betrayed last round

The reason for this surprise was that the potential of retaliation in iterated scenarios made betrayal unsustainable.

In the one-off prisoner’s dilemma, players can betray and get away with the benefit of betrayal. But in long-term scenarios like the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, the retaliation from the opponent is very likely to put both players into the mud of endless mutual betrayal. Without the luring yet unsustainable reward of betrayal, cooperation becomes the go-to option in the long run. Betrayal is just bad, objectively bad.

The champion among the computer programs, the cooperation-based “tit for tat” is the selfish cooperator we seek. Indeed its success relies on the long-term nature of the game, but most of the real-life scenarios like reducing carbon emissions are inherently long-term as well. With the success of “tit for tat”, we can consider the myth of rational betrayal debunked: Selfish people can also be rationally cooperative.

We can create more cooperation, not by hoping selfish people magically become selfless, but by realizing cooperation does maximize the individual interests. Therefore, we can use this new rationale to make a better argument for cooperation, one that’s more objective.

So Here’s What to Tell Mr. Trump…

By examining the prisoner’s’ dilemma, we found a common but incomplete view of the scenario that leads to a dangerous conclusion, the myth of rational betrayal. This myth lures selfish people to betray based on their interests and limits selfless people to cooperate based on only their morality.

However, by debunking this myth with a more thorough view of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, we discovered another argument for cooperation, the objective interest-based argument. With this argument, we can persuade even the most selfish people to cooperate because cooperation is in fact in their best interest.

To create more cooperation (and maybe save the planet as well), what we need to do is to share this vision of cooperation and exclaim that: betrayal may be good for individuals in the short run, but it is utterly bad in the long run. We don’t need to turn people into selfless saints, we just need them to be rational enough to not be lured by the short-term benefit of betrayal.

So if we want to convince Trump probably not to quit the Paris agreement, an argument based on just saving the planet is not going to work, but if we show him how cooperation is actually putting America first, he might just agree.

Photo Credit: Sam Jotham Sutharson, Jose Moreno, Perry Grone, Clément H on Unsplash, goodfreephotos.com