I teach a seminar titled "Ideas of Human Nature" in which I restrict enrollment to 15 students. Others typically want to get in, and yet much of the class's popularity stems from the benefits that come from keeping it small. Most students understand the advantages of small classes, and they wouldn't want everyone who wishes admittance to get in; just themselves! If everyone gets in, the class becomes too big and discussion is inhibited, to everyone's disadvantage. And so, each year I find myself in the difficult position of telling a number of students that there simply isn't room for them. Each student turned away from this class understands the logic, but nonetheless, each would like the limit to be expanded -- by just one.

It would seem, then, that we need to look beyond the merely 'technical' level if we wish to solve the Prisoner's Dilemma. However, this is not to say that rationality is no use to us but that, rather, our conventional understanding of what it means to be 'rational' is simply too narrow and needs broadening a little. Thus, we come back to the quote at the start of this article. Irrationality, says Douglas Hofstadter, is the 'square root' - ie, the cause - of all evil. Fair enough - but how can we distinguish, once and for all, what is rational from what is irrational? A possible answer lies in Hofstadter's concept of superrationality - that is, looking outside one's own decision and taking into account the decisions of others too, and consequently making the decision that one would hope they would also make. In other words, the 'superrationalist' thinks 'globally' - in the wider interest - rather than 'locally', simply with his/her own interest in mind.

Charismatic leaders and media personalities can be destabilizing influences on social groups, according to various "small-world network" models. This conclusion seems intuitively consistent with historical events such as civil uprisings and religious movements.

But, surprisingly, long range connections in a network
(which reduce the degree of separation among members) seem to hinder the system's return to equilibrium, according to a new model that combines small-world scenarios with a version of the "prisoner's-dilemma" proposition, according to which a pair of captured criminals ponder strategy: if neither criminal confesses, both go free; if one confesses, the other receives a stiff sentence; if both confess, they each receive moderate sentences. The study may help us to understand the dynamics of such social behaviors as smoking among teenagers, which is influenced by various factors including local social surroundings and the examples set by media role models.

The Evolution of Cooperation
By Robert Axelrod
Copyright 1997

Prisoner's Dilemma/John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb
William Poundstone
Copyright 1993
ISBN 038541580X