A key issue in considering social preferences and advantageous altruism is whether one sees the basic state of individual-individual and group-group interactions in terms of a Prisoner's Dilemma game or a Trust game. My own belief is that the Trust game is often a better representation of reality than the PD game. Further, Trust represents players as motivated in a way that the players themselves would likely accept, while the PD takes a cynical view that the players themselves would not likely accept, much as it may be true for certain individuals and situations.
Let's make the point concrete by considering the basic violence matrix that Pinker introduces under the label of The Pacifist's Dilemma (Figure 10-1, p. 679); your payoffs followed by the other's payoffs are shown in the parentheses:
Other
Pacifist Aggressor
Pacifist Peace (5, 5) Defeat/Victory (-100, 10)
Self
Aggressor Victory/Defeat (10, -100) War (-50, -50)
This negative-sum game is a PD, in that no matter what the other player does, you are better off being an agressor. You get 10 instead of 5 if he is peaceful, and -50 instead of -100 if he is an aggressor.
Now consider a Trust game, which I'll call Trust or Fight:
Other
Pacifist Aggressor
Pacifist Peace (10, 10) Defeat/Victory (-100, 5)
Self
Aggressor Victory/Defeat (5, -100) War (-50, -50)
The payoffs here are the same as in Pinker's game with the significant exception that the best outcome for both players is peace between them rather than victory over a peaceful other.
The Trust game accords with what a great majority of modern humans (and I suspect a large majority of current and ancient hunter-gatherers as well) would be willing to describe as their payoffs. Successfully raiding a neighboring band to kill the men and steal the sheep and the women is not a higher payoff outcome than living in peace. By contrast, the PD weighing of violent victory as the most preferred outcome defies what people would claim about themselves--which I believe is true most though not all of the time for the vast majority of humans.
It is quite right that some of the time the PD captures the potential for violence in a given dyadic interaction in a way that Trust does not. But far more of the time, I believe Trust captures the reality and the PD does not. A very large majority of the time--certainly now, and I believe for all the time modern homo sapiens has wandered on the planet--people do not follow a psychopathic payoff function of valuing the killing of innocent others and the theft of their possessions over peace. It is certainly true, as Pinker writes, that some portion of the time people are violent and attack others, impelled by pure predation, by a righteous downgrading of the other, or by fear of the other. But that violent state strikes me as the exception not the rule. Human beings are so made, I would suggest, such that predatory violence is not appealing to most of us most of the time. Rather, most of us most of the time would prefer to live in peace with the other, even if we knew we could get away with killing and robbing him.
Or, to put it in terms of the Republic and Glaucon's questioning of Socrates: For most of us most of the time, the best outcome is not to do injustice to another successfully, but to live justly with another who lives justly with us. The psychopath's perspective that a violence game based on the PD implicitly adopts is one very important reality of human nature in the past and the present. But the ordinary person's perspective that deeply fears the worst outcome of being killed and robbed and that does not value killing and robbing the other over peace is a much more common and also highly important feature of human nature. My personal preference is for a Trust game modeling of violence that adopts the ordinary person's self-professed payoffs as the norm, rather than a PD modeling that eschews the payoffs ordinary people would profess in favor of payoffs psychopaths would profess.
None of the foregoing is meant as an empirical point about the historical changes that are the focus of Pinker's book. It is possible that I am right about the Trust game as the better one to describe the problem of violence in all or most modern societies, while Pinker is right about the PD as the better one in classical Greece and all other societies circa 300 BCE.
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