The Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the best-known experiments in game theory. Two people accused of a crime are questioned separately. If neither confesses, both receive a light sentence. If one confesses while the other remains silent, the confessor goes free and the other receives a severe sentence. If both confess, both are punished heavily. Each person therefore has a rational incentive to protect himself, yet when both do so, they end up worse off. What looks sensible individually can become destructive collectively. There is something about this dilemma that extends well beyond game theory.
Research suggests that cooperation is far more common in everyday life than cynicism would have us believe. People are generally willing to help others, sometimes at considerable cost to themselves, and societies depend on enormous amounts of trust, assistance and cooperation between people who are not related to one another. Yet there is an intriguing contradiction: when the stakes become high, groups are more likely to choose the self-interested option.
I have often wondered about this contradiction because my own experience has overwhelmingly reinforced the first finding. I have travelled extensively and worked across countries, cultures and large organisations. When you deal with people individually, most are remarkably decent. Ask genuinely for help and, more often than not, someone will try to help. Yet put good people inside a system and something can change.
Consider a restructuring in which a company needs to eliminate several hundred jobs. Around the table may be thoughtful, decent people who would find it extremely difficult to sit across from one employee and treat the loss of a livelihood casually. Yet the collective conversation can quickly become about headcount, numbers, timelines, communication protocols and execution. Nobody around the table necessarily lacks empathy. But as the individual becomes a number and responsibility becomes distributed across the system, the human being can quietly disappear from the conversation.
This is what I find more interesting than simply labelling organisations selfish or bureaucratic. How do individually considerate people sometimes produce collectively insensitive outcomes?
I don’t think there is one answer. Responsibility may become diluted when it is shared. Organisational language can create distance from the human consequences of a decision. People conform to what the group considers normal. Targets and incentives narrow attention. Sometimes a powerful individual sets the tone and others go along with it. And perhaps, just as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, we begin protecting ourselves because we assume everyone else will do the same.
None of this means that organisations should avoid difficult decisions. Businesses have to restructure, close operations, reject proposals, allocate scarce resources and sometimes let good people go. The question is not whether hard decisions should be made. It is whether the people making them have to become hard in the process. That distinction matters.
Large systems are ultimately experienced through individuals. An organisation may have thousands of employees, layers of hierarchy, policies, processes and competing interests, but at the moment that matters, somebody is sitting across from somebody else. A manager gives the difficult feedback. A colleague decides whether to help. A leader chooses whether to listen. Someone decides whether another person’s circumstances deserve consideration.
Perhaps this is where the Prisoner’s Dilemma leaves us with something more useful than a lesson about cooperation. Systems certainly shape behaviour, sometimes powerfully. But they do not completely erase individual choice.
However impersonal the system becomes, there is still a person inside it. Reach the person, and you may reach the human side that the system has temporarily pushed into the background. That may be one reason why asking for help so often works. We stop engaging with the system and start engaging with the person.
And more often than we expect, the person responds.
