Being First

Photo credit: The Independent Newspaper, 2016

There is a saying in street fighting: Be first! This makes a lot of sense in that context. The first blow can knock someone out or at least unbalance them so that one can maintain the advantage and follow up with some fight-ending hits. Combatants who are too busy posturing and blustering to see their opponent getting ready to hit them have already lost the fight.

This limited, brutal, context for the principal of being first is not actually as far as it may seem from the daily experiences of most people. Most people automatically put themselves first, as if every interaction with another person were a street fight. That this is the norm is illustrated by the fact that deviations from it — someone giving their seat to another person on the subway, letting someone into a line of slow moving traffic, not fighting over who gets the taxi — are notable and memorable.

Far more often we might notice people treating others as competitors. Computer-modeling in economic games theory in the 80s produced some memorable strategies for interacting with other people as competitors, or potential collaborators (see Robert Axelrod’s book The Evolution of Cooperation for more).

The best strategy for a long time was called tit for tat. In its simplest sense, the strategy means treating others as they have treated you: if they are nice, you are nice; if they are nasty, you are nasty. At least in the kind of games in which this strategy was tested, it was enormously successful (see the Note at the end of this post if you’re interested in some more details). It has its limitations, however.

I used to use these games in workshops on the topic of competition and cooperation. We would find in those workshops, playing the games in pairs with one another, that one of the pros and cons of the strategy is its stability. What you do depends on what you think the other person will do (unless you have studied this kind of strategy and know the “correct” moves), and perhaps on your models of other people more generally. If both people playing are cooperating — starting out nice and going on being nice — then they can happily go on forever taking turns being nice and everyone wins. On the other hand, however, once both people start competing — being nasty — they can get stuck forever in a stalemate with both people losing. No one wants to risk taking a turn at being nice and losing if the other person is going to stay being nasty, so they both go on minimizing their losses instead of maximizing their gains.

The stability of the strategy with nice players is its strength, but its weakness when players are being nasty. Eventually another strategy turned up in the computer simulations that was better. That strategy is called win stay, lose shift. It is essentially the same as the tit for tat strategy, except it contains a crucial extra element of flexibility. If whatever one last did was successful for you, you keep doing that (win stay). If however your last move led to a loss, then you switch strategies, and do the opposite (lose shift).

In everyday life, people unfortunately often treat others as if they were likely to play nasty with them, and so start out nasty themselves, leading to a repetitive cycle of losing because of being afraid of losing even bigger, or of someone else “winning,” relative to you. It takes, to be fair, really a lot of courage to see that what feels like your only self-protective strategy is actually a losing one for all concerned, and to try something different.

The risk of putting another person first seems too great, as being second can seem like being truly last, and losing everything. But to get out of the cycle of lose-lose, one person has to do the seemingly impossible: putting someone else first. Or, perhaps more psychologically accurate, not automatically putting yourself first, and allowing the other person to be at least as important as you.

In this light, it is possible to see that being first can mean more than putting oneself before others: it can also mean being the first one to take the risk and break the stalemate, for everyone’s benefit.

Note:

The normal prisoner’s dilemma game takes a little while to understand (you really get a lot out of playing it with others as a repeated (iterated) game), as the outcomes are given in terms of years served in prison, and so the numbers are a bit counterintuitive: the goal is to get low numbers. The story goes something like this: Two people have been caught robbing a bank. If they both stay quiet, cooperating with each other, then they each get one year in prison on the circumstantial evidence. There is a temptation to snitch and make a deal, selling out the other robber, in which case you get off free and they get 3 years hard time. But if you both snitch, you both get 2 years. What to do? Take a gamble on going free; risk getting stuck with 3 years by your partner; hope they will stay quiet and both suck up doing 1 year; or avoid getting snitched on and take a chance that you both snitch and do 2 years each?

……………………..PERSON B

PERSON A………..NICE………………NASTY

NICE………………A1…………………A3

…………………….B1…………………B0

NASTY……………A0…………………A2

……………………B3………………….B2

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