Wright & Wright on the cooperation arms race

Well this couldn't come at a better time - the great Will Wright says that Cooperation & Competition are a big part of his motivation for working on Spore. Spore is a simulation coming out this fall which looks to re-invent the definition of computer "game" for all of us. Here's Will:

Quotes from this video which are most pertinent to stuff I've talked about before:

"You'll have little cells competing, then at some point, some of them decide to group together and cooperate & become specialized - and you get multicellular creatures. You see a similar pattern when individuals group together, forming very simple societies and out-competing the individuals."

"I see evolution as...this interplay of competition driving cooperation, driving specialization which then brings the competition to the next level."

In other words, competitive pressure drives organizational structures towards ever-greater complexity as previously unrelated entities are forced to either stand together or fall apart.

This is very similar to what Nonzero calls the "logic of human destiny": the reason why sentient life, societies, and world wars were inevitable from the time the first single-celled organisms appeared. I think Robert Wright (author of Nonzero, no relation to Will Wright that I know of) also refers to this as the "arms race" of cooperation: stubborn individualists are eventually dominated by coalitions of their enemies, whether we're talking about cells, species, or societies.

Cross-cultural study of cooperation and freeloaders

Here's a neat study that investigates how cultural background impacts social behavior. It looks at some of the same themes as my "Rise of Cooperation" toy you can download from the toolbar.

For the sake of readability (and controversy), I'm going to label a society that is democratic with a strong rule of law "advanced", while a less-democratic society with a perceived weak government is "primitive".

In advanced societies, the average person cooperated with strangers for the greater good. When a freeloader is revealed, the average person was willing to give up a small amount of their own resources to ensure that the freeloader was punished.

In primitive societies, the average person was willing to free-load; if punished, the freeloader would "revenge punish" whoever chose to punish them previously.

After repeated plays, the net accumulation of resources was much higher in the advanced societies as freeloading was reined-in.