From the pages of The Economist magazine (recommended reading, giving a point of view from outside the United States), an article on the outcomes of "public goods games", research that has the potential to provide a lot of insight on how politics in democracies works (or, on occasion, doesn’t…). The concluding paragraphs:
… The researchers were able to divide their subjects very cleanly into co-operators, free-riders and reciprocators, based on how many tokens they contributed to the pool, and how they reacted to the collective contributions of others. Of 84 participants, 81 fell unambiguously into one of the three categories. Having established who was who, they then created “bespokeâ€? games, to test whether people changed strategy. They did not. Dr Kurban and Dr Houser were thus able to predict the outcomes of these games quite reliably. And the three strategies did, indeed, have the same average pay-offs to the individuals who played them—though only 13% were co-operators, 20% free-riders and 63% reciprocators.
This is only a preliminary result, but it is intriguing. It suggests that people’s approaches to co-operation with their fellows are, indeed, evolutionarily stable. Of course, it is a long stretch from showing equal success in a laboratory game to showing it in the mating game that determines evolutionary outcomes. But it is good to know that in this context at least, nice guys do not come last. They do just as well as the nasty guys and, indeed, as the wary majority.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.