Albert Einstein once said: “Nothing
truly valuable can be achieved except by the unselfish cooperation of many
individuals." Alas, when it comes to joining together to conserve Earth's
resources and protect our planet for future generations, we humans have proven
to be a decidedly uncooperative lot.
"There has been a great deal of
work on how people cooperate with those they see every day–-their colleagues or
friends,"Dr. Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard
University, said in a written statement. "But an open question is how
people cooperate with future generations. How do you make altruistic decisions
today that benefit people tomorrow?"
For those who worry that we'll never
come together to protect our planet, a provocative new study involving game
theory, conducted by Nowak and a colleague at Yale University, offers a glimmer
of hope.
For the study, 480 men and women took
turns playing a “public goods” game, in which five players at a time divided a
pool of resources among themselves.
Each player was allowed to collect a
maximum of 20 "units" of the resource, out of 100 units total. The
players were told that if they collected all of the resources, none would be
left for future people who played the game. They could only "harvest"
up to half of the resources if they wanted to preserve the resources for future
players.
How did the games play out? Players
exhausted the resources in almost every game. In most cases, four of the
players would cooperate and make decisions to preserve the resources, while one
rogue player took a big share.
The researchers said this suggests
that most people actually are cooperative, but they only want to cooperate if
they are certain other people will do the same—essentially, no one wants to be
the sucker.
"In some sense, this
illustrates why the free market fails to solve problems like climate
change," Nowak said in the statement. "Even if you want to cooperate
with the future, you may not do so because you are afraid of being exploited by
the present."
Then the researchers had 370 players
play the game, but this time, vote on how much of the resource should be given
to each player. They took the median of the votes and distributed that amount—and
what they found next was pretty surprising.
"When we implemented this
system, virtually every resource was saved," Nowak said in the statement.
"The surprising observation is that while there is a minority of people
who don't want to cooperate, the majority of people vote altruistically. They
are not voting to maximize their own benefit, and that's what allows for
cooperation with the future."
This version of the game also
reassured cooperators that they would not become "the sucker," and it
allowed cooperative players to keep the rogue player in check.
Reprinted
from the Huffington Post
This experiment demonstrates that
we, as a collective community, can work together to be good stewards of our natural
resources. That’s why today’s gift was to designate Klamath Sustainable
Communities as the beneficiary of a percentage of the dollars I spend at the
local Fred Meyer grocery store. So, if we all aspire to be more cooperative and
work together to create a better future, no one will have to worry about being
a sucker.
Watch the video of the game being
played:
In Giving,
Robin
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