The Evolution of Trust
Originally Posted 12/5/24
Intro
The first thing I want to mention, is I'll be talking about some thoughts I had either while or shortly after playing this interactive game, The Evolution of Trust. If you'd like to play it first, by all means go ahead. The game sort of goes through some of game theory to talk about trust, in a really nice interactive way. I think it's a great learning tool, and I like how it was designed.
What is the Prisoner's Dilemma?
If you've not heard of it before, the Prisoner's Dilemma is a thought experiment where basically you have two people with a choice in front of them, and they can't tell each other what choice they're making. If they cooperate, they get a good outcome. If they both turn against each other, they both suffer a negative consequence. If only one of them turns against the other, the one who does the turning gets a great outcome for themselves, and the other person receives a harsher consequence than if they had both turned against each other. From Wikipedia:
Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail. The prisoners are given a little time to think this over, but in no case may either learn what the other has decided until he has irrevocably made his decision. Each is informed that the other prisoner is being offered the very same deal. Each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare—with minimizing his own prison sentence.
Visually:
How does it relate to The Evolution of Trust?
The whole sort of game operates off of the Prisoner's Dilemma. It takes you through some scenarios where you're playing a game with different types of people. The game is basically you can insert a coin into a machine, and receive some coins back. If you both do it, you get some coins back. If one person chooses not to put in a coin in, and the other person does, the person who put in a coin gets nothing and the person who didn't put in a coin receives more than if they cooperated. If neither person puts in a coin, neither person gets anything (other than losing the coin they put in). The game will have you go against people who have different strategies, and the goal is to have the most coins.
As the game goes on, it just lets you run simulations about what happens when people with different strategies go against each other, and see who comes out on top. (Minor spoiler coming) In general, the copycat strategy works best. That is, you do whatever the person did to you last time.
As the interaction goes on, you're able to play around with different variables - how big is the payout if you cooperate? How negative are the consequences if you don't? How many rounds do you play with someone? How many people are using a given strategy? There's a handful of others, but it's fun to see how they change the outcome.
What made you want to talk about this?
Well, for me, it sort of hit upon a nice intersection of a few things that interest me.
Magic
Me and a group of friends often play Magic the Gathering with each other. We also play a lot of other board games together, and because of this, we have really learned how each other works, and their strategies. Making deals is often part of the games we play, and I often avoid making them if possible. This is because I've long ago realized that the deals being made always have some twist or hidden meaning. The only time I tend to make deals, is if what the person is offering me is inconsequential to what I wanted to do anyways, or if I know I'm going to lose regardless.
I bring up Magic in particular though, because one of our friends really likes the card Prisoner's Dilemma, which is just the Prisoner's Dilemma but in Magic. Everytime he plays this card, I always pick silence. It's simply the right thing to do in my mind. My hope is that other people pick silence, and that over time they'll realize I only ever pick silence, and so they might as well too. However, what often happens instead, is my opponents know I'll alwyas choose silence, and so always choose snitch. To me I rather be known as the person who always chooses the good option, rather than the one who chooses the bad one, and so if you want to take advantage of that, more of a judgement on you than me. In The Evolution of Trust, this is also the option I picked every time - I was going to do the morally right thing each time, even if I didn't get the best results from it.
This actually gets to the heart of one of the things The Evolution of Trust is getting at - trust is built by repeatedly interacting with the same people over and over again. You learn their habits, and learn to either trust them, or trust that they will take a certain action. In the Magic example, the other players at the table trust I will always take silence, that I tend to not win, and that if I know I'm going to lose my mission simply becomes to cause chaos, or screw over whoever hurt me the most in the game. I similarly can trust that 2 of the players will always make deals that may sound good, but have a secret meaning. The third player I can always trust will try to do the right thing and either attack who has the highest health, or who is the easiest to hit (which often means I'm the one getting attacked as it usually takes a while for my board state to come online). These sort of things though lead to really interesting dynamics when playing with each other.
A bit of a side tangent, but this sort of thing can also be leveraged. Two examples come to mind:
- I don't scoop - Scooping in Magic is when you basically fold or quit the game. You forfeit. I typically don't do this. I believe that other people should be able to see their decks work as optimally as they can, and get the feeling of great achievement when it all comes together. Because of this, even if I'm hanging on until the last possible moment, opponents don't really think I have something up my sleeve. It's viewed as I'm just doing what I always do - holding out to let the player who's obviously going to win do whatever they want and win. It's happened twice now though where I do have an answer. In one game, the opponent full swung at me and I had a card that basically either directed all the damage back at him, or killed all attacking creatures (I forget which). Either way, it let me win the following turn. The second time this had happened one opponent thought I had king made - taken him out of the game to let another player win - as it seemed like I had no chance. I forget exactly what happened in that game, but similarly I was able to pull the win out.
- I don't make deals - Typically, I don't make deals in games. If I do, I tend to try and not make them have a hidden meaning or anything. There was a time recently though where I did make such a deal, and I don't think anyone was expecting it. The deal I made was basically "I will not harm anything on your board if you don't counterspell the next card I play". This took a bit of back and forth to get the wording exactly right, but eventually we agreed on something. The next card I played let me take control of an opponents creatures for the turn, and use them to attack. Technically, I was not harming anything on his board, because they were no longer on his board. They were on my board. I believe another player also argued I wasn't the one harming them, since the player I was attacking could choose to not block. But because they were choosing to block, they were the one choosing to damage the creatures.
These examples though sort of illustrate another point made in The Evolution of Trust - trust can be eroded and circumstances can change how people feel about you. Since that first example above, my friends have been much more weary if I'm still in it at the end of the game, often not full swinging for fear of what happened before. In The Evolution of Trust, this sort of thing is what the creator is talking about when discussing how, in the modern world, people are less and less trusting of each other, and the world seems to be made up of more and more people who choose the "snitch" option.
A quick aside before we move on from Magic, from playing together so often we'd get into discussions of who was winning the most. And this would sometimes cause disagreements, where someone would say "I'm only targeting you because you always win", to which the other person would object and say that wasn't true. So we started tracking it all. You can click here for a screenshot of the winrates currently.
Society
The other way this interactive game struck upon something that interests me is where it talks about society in general. In the game it quotes a statistic:
In 1985, when Americans were asked how many close friends they had, the most common answer was "three". In 2004, the most common answer was "zero". We now have fewer friends across class, racial, economic, and political lines, because we have fewer friends -- period. And as you just discovered for yourself, the fewer "repeat interactions" there are, the more distrust will spread.
As time has gone on, people have gotten more and more distrustful of each other. It seems America is more divided now than it has been in a long time. In the 2024 Presidential Election, Trump won the popular vote with only a margin of 1.48%. This is the 11th smallest popular vote margin according to Wikipedia. Funnily enough, 2016 Trump was even lower (at rank number 3) with a margin of -2.09% (he lost the popular vote but won the electoral college). But what this means is roughly half the country is not happy with who is the leader of the country, and (presumably) disagrees with the policy decisions they're making (or going to make). Looking at that Wikipedia chart, the highest margin in the last 11 elections was Ronald Reagan, back in 1984 with roughly 18%. After that, the next highest is 8.5% in 1996 with Bill Clinton. It seems to me, in recent history, almost half the country has been unhappy with who was elected president. On top of this, since who you vote for typically also shows what sort of values or moral system you have, how do you trust your fellow Americans if half of them seem to have completely different values than you do? Or they view the world in such a different light than you do?
The Evolution of Trust doesn't really go into too much details on these points - it's mostly pointing out how these sort of things come to be, and some ways to lesson the impact (like having more interactions with people directly for example). Another way to be more trustful is being more empathetic and understanding mistakes happen. One quote that comes to mind to me is that we tend to judge people based on their actions, but judge ourselves based on our intentions. Trying to give people the benefit of the doubt generally leads to being more peaceful, I find at least. Another thing that comes to my mind in this vein is the Ben Franklin effect, in which having people do things for you increases how much they like and/or trust you. I would imagine if people were more active in smaller communities, either online or in person, this effect would go off more often since you'd be more likely to interact with the same people and ask them for things over time, leading to an overall less divisive feeling in the world.
Overall though I don't think there's a single right answer to "What should we do in society to make it better". But this sort of thing does fascinate me and so seeing The Evolution of Trust touch upon it made me very interested.
Wrap Up
I did not realize I would talk this much on this subject. I originally thought about making this just a post, but something told me to go ahead and make a full blog about it, and I'm glad I did. Let me know your thoughts though - did anything not make sense? What are your take on things?