The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a hypothetical puzzle from game theory, which is the mathematics of predicting behavioral strategies. The Prisoner’s Dilemma gets its name from a thought experiment in which there are two prisoners who have been separated into different jail cells. The police are trying to get the prisoners to confess to a serious joint crime (say, shooting someone). Neither prisoner knows what the other one is saying to the police. If neither prisoner confesses, they get short jail time for a milder crime (say, a month in prison for firearms possession). If both confess, they each get short jail times for the serious crime, with early parole for telling the truth (say, a year in prison). But if one confesses while the other stays silent, then the one who confesses is set free, while the one who doesn’t confess goes to jail for a long time (say, five years). In other words, the prisoners can get the best possible outcome for their group of two if each refuses to betray the other and they both remain silent. However, each prisoner can get the best odds of being set free by betraying the other and confessing. The Prisoner’s Dilemma shows that when two individuals are interacting, it’s usually more logical and beneficial for each individual to act in a way that is selfish rather than altruistic, because there is less risk in acting selfishly. Richard Dawkins believes that interactions in nature are essentially versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. He uses this concept to explain that mutual cooperation happens in nature when it reduces the chance of a bad outcome (such as death) in the future, but also why selfishness is the more likely explanation for behavior.
Prisoner’s Dilemma Quotes in The Selfish Gene
The The Selfish Gene quotes below are all either spoken by Prisoner’s Dilemma or refer to Prisoner’s Dilemma. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 12
Quotes
I agree with Axelrod and Hamilton that many wild animals and plants are engaged in ceaseless games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, played out in evolutionary time.
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Prisoner’s Dilemma Term Timeline in The Selfish Gene
The timeline below shows where the term Prisoner’s Dilemma appears in The Selfish Gene. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 10: You Scratch My Back, I’ll Ride on Yours
Trivers looked at this puzzle too, and used the Prisoner’s Dilemma from game theory (the mathematics of strategic interactions) to solve it in 1971. Trivers worked...
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Chapter 12: Nice Guys Finish First
...Robert Axelrod and Hamilton that many wild animals are “engaged in ceaseless games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma , played out in evolutionary time,” which explains why nice guys finish first.
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The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a strategy game in which two people each have two cards. One card says...
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There’s another version of the game called the “Iterated (Repeated) Prisoner’s Dilemma. ” In this version, the same players play the game over and over again, meaning...
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...competition where he programmed a computer to play all the possible strategies in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (including one strategy that was simply “random”) 200 times. There are 15 possible strategies. It...
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Axelrod ran his Prisoner’s Dilemma game multiple times. Dawkins thinks each round of games is analogous to a generation. When...
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