Today is the Holly Day of Love, another of the values I take on faith, although I think I can support this one with reason, math and testing. There is this fascinating little plot line running lately in The Good Wife. A character claims there are two kinds of people, one who will say “excuse me” when they accidentally bump into another person, and one who will say “watch out”. He suggests that if the lead character shifts from the former to the latter she will become more of a winner. But my faith in Love makes me want to encourage everyone to move in the other direction. Surrounded by defectors, i.e. in a world without love, the cooperator suffers. But the most successful strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma (PD) turns out to be tit for tat with forgiveness.
Traffic is an amazing microcosm of social interaction, that can be played in some of the same ways as PD. One of the ways I taught my kids to be kind and generous people was to play with them in traffic. E.g. if I accidentally cut someone off, I would tell them to observe the other driver and their reaction if I either waved a little apology or flipped them off. Time after time we would observe the anger drain away from the face of those drivers after an apology, and see the rage build with the flip off. It’s pretty easy to extrapolate that more drivers with more rage will lead to a poor outcome for everyone who may become entangled in crash they had nothing to do with generating.
In the short term, one may win more often with the watch out strategy. The problem is then they, and everyone else, has to live in a world where it is harder for anyone to win, where the losses are more damaging, and the wins more fleeting. No doubt that when fewer and fewer among the playing pool defect, the benefit of cooperating surges and can be shared by the whole pool.
It is the tragedy of the commons, and it is not inevitable given just a bit of perspective (COP21!) or a little bit of LOVE.
HOLLY DAYS 