Sublime

how cooperation can emerge among egoists without central authority.

The take-home message from Schelling’s story—that incentives sometimes backfire—is familiar to psychologists.

TIT FOR TAT is merely the strategy of starting with cooperation, and thereafter doing what the other player did on the previous move.

Mathematically, there is an optimal way to play such games, but it assumes that players are strangers who will never meet again (i.e. you and that secondhand car salesman). Dutifully, the students produced the optimal solution. But most of the players in the ethnographic societies did not. They either accepted offers that were far too low or insist

She argued that by exhibiting friendly behaviours both before and after being forced to compete, male pairs are able to communicate willingness to accept the outcome of a competitive event and still cooperate afterwards, thereby limiting the risk that an opponent will take pre-emptive or retaliatory action.