So you believe in winning at all costs, even screwing fellow colleagues to get ahead in life? Well you may be in a bit of shock. An article in Popsi.com says although the selfish can survive for a while, but according to new game theory research, long-term survival requires cooperation.
The website quotes a study published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences that presented a new breakthrough strategy for the Prisoner's Dilemma, a classic game theory situation that presents two prisoners with the opportunity to either cooperate or betray each other in exchange for lesser sentences, widely studied as a model for economics, psychology and evolutionary biology.
According to the article, using a strategy called zero-determinant, or ZD (meaning that in the mathematical model, the value called the determinant is set to zero), the paper argued that selfish players could be guaranteed to beat cooperative players, enforcing "a unilateral claim to an unfair share of rewards." Since the Prisoner's Dilemma is used to explain biological phenomena, it raised the question: Does evolution favor jerks?
The article says that Michigan State University microbiology and molecular genetics professor Christoph Adami and his research associate Arend Hintze immediately had doubts about whether ZD strategies could prove that evolution favors the selfish over the cooperative.
In a paper published on August 9 in Nature Communications, they argue that according to their simulations, ZD strategies aren't evolutionarily stable, and that eventually, selfish players would have to become cooperative to survive. "We found evolution will punish you if you're selfish and mean," Adami said in a press statement.
(The Economic Times)
