It should come as a surprise to no one that the party in power in the US is pushing to install a new supreme court justice with haste – before an election they stand a non-zero chance of losing.
The fact that this same group vociferously and successfully obstructed a similar appointment four years ago is being broadly cast as “evidence of hypocrisy.” If it’s hypocrisy isn’t the point, the point is they understand the game they’re playing, and are playing to win. Call it (calling out?) hypocrisy doesn’t change anything.
The prisoner’s dilemma, in case you’ve forgotten, is a simple game with rules often phrased something like this:
You and a partner-in-crime are arrested. You’re kept apart, unable to communicate. You’re both told that if you both admit to the crime, you’ll each face 3 years incarceration. If you both stay silent, there’s sufficient evidence to convict on a lesser charge, so you’ll both face one year in jail. If one of you implicates the other, who stays silent, the silent implicated party will be jailed for 5 years, and the betrayer set free.”
To people who study games the window dressing (crime and jail) don’t really matter – what matters is the relationship between cooperation, betrayal, and rewards.
It should be evident that both players end up best if they cooperate and stay silent. But if one party betrays the other, the betrayer suffers no penalty and imposes a larger one on the one they betray. So for each individual player, betrayal looks like a better outcome than cooperation. The net result is that mutual betrayal is, in a sense, the most likely outcome.
A single play of the game is interesting as a study in trust and self-interest. And individual political outcomes are often intuitively understandable by treating them “roughly” as a prisoners dilemma. But what we should be thinking about are repeated plays of the game.
Implicit in the relationship between cooperation and self-interest, and often overlooked, is the equality between the actors. Betrayal from either actor penalizes equally. This equality means “if you hurt me, I can hurt you.” And so it’s fairly easy to convince ones self that if you’re playing the prisoners dilemma over and over against the same opponent, a good strategy might be to initially cooperate, and then “do unto them as they did unto you.”
Tit for tat.
Intuitively most of us would call this strategy “fair,” and it turns out to be both simple to describe and highly effective at achieving cooperation.
Tit-for-tat clearly isn’t generally possible in American politics, due to party power dynamics if nothing else – but I wonder how the party and partisans would behave if it was.