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V. Is the prisoners dilemmaall of sociology?Arthur L. Stinchcombe aa University of Bergen ,b University of Arizona ,Published online: 29 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Arthur L. Stinchcombe (1980) V. Is the prisoners dilemma all ofsociology?, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 23:2, 187-192, DOI:10.1080/00201748008601901

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201748008601901

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Symposium: Jon Elster's Logic and Society* Inquiry, 23, 187-92

V. Is the Prisoners' Dilemma all ofSociology?

Arthur L. StinchcombeUniversity of Bergen andUniversity of Arizona

If social relations often require the choice of a cooperative solution to a prisoners'dilemma, we must ask how people generally solve the games. Three possible de-vices are that those who choose non-cooperative strategies get a bad reputation andso learn to be cooperative, that people are taught by parents that non-cooperatorshave unhappy lives, or that an official can be paid a salary to make the cooperativechoice. By analyzing erotic love and marriage, and why people try to do their jobs,it is suggested that these devices result in people often solving prisoners' dilemmagames without being conscious of them. How then do these structures that 'havethe function' of solving prisoners' dilemmas get created and maintain themselves?It is suggested that Deweyan consciousness, existing only when structural strains orunsolved games create personal problems, is adequate to explain many such func-tional structures.

Mark Twain, in an essay on James Fenimore Cooper, says that Cooperhas a few little devices he likes to make go, such as stepping on a twig.When silence is worth three dollars a minute, a Cooper character has tohunt up a twig to step on to alert all the Indians around. Twain proposes torename the Leatherstocking series the Broken Twig series. It would be amalicious exaggeration to say that in Elster's book,* if people want to havea social relation they have to hunt up a prisoners' dilemma to overcome.But as in Cooper's case, the reader would recognize whom one was beingmalicious about. So let me use this malicious paragraph to introduce ashort essay about what else there is to social structure besides prisoners'dilemmas.

A good place to start is with erotic love, because ordinary people createa great many marriages which, while they fail more often than they usedto, still fail less often than new businesses or new political parties. Whilethe reasons people marry, and even more amazing, stay married, have notbeen sufficiently investigated, I will hazard the empirical guess that now-

* Jon Elster, Logic and Society: Contradictions and Possible Worlds, John Wiley & Sons,Chichester/New York/Brisbane/Toronto 1978, viii + 235 pp., 10.95.

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188 Arthur L. Stinchcombe

adays erotic love has a lot to do with it. To turn love into a prisoners'dilemma, we have to urge that people will get more utility if they get theirown satisfaction without the costs of caring for the other, and therefore thedominant outcome is that neither cares, both take cold showers and try toforget it. We all know, and avoid, pedpfe who have the seducer's prefer-ence ordering. But clearly millions of people could not build durablemarriages if cold showers were the dominant outcome. (Perhaps, how-ever, the divorce rate of sociologists indicates why the prisoners' dilemmaseems the very model of a modern social theory.)

There are several ordinary social processes that decrease the frequencyof erotic relations in which cold showers are the dominant outcome. A firstis that one gets a reputation as a seducer if one has the preference orderingin which being cared for but not caring is the highest utility. As nearly as Ican estimate from casual observation, a reputation as a seducer, as avail-able on a casual basis, does in fact increase seduction for both sexes. Thatis, the normal factual outcome is not cold showers, but a series of boringaffairs in which neither one cares. But since marriages are generally madein small social circles in which one has a reputation, whenever people startcaring for a seducer they are warned off by friends. This reputation-build-ing process in the operative marriage market (i.e. in small social circles)therefore produces a situation in which it is rational to care, if one wants tobe cared for.

A second important device is that parents believe that unless peoplelearn to love others, they will be unhappy, and in particular will haveunhappy marriages. Just as one's social circle makes immediate judg-ments about whether one has a winning strategy with a seducer, parentsmake long-term judgments about whether seducers have happy lives.While no doubt one should teach one's children a certain amount of irony,a gentle cynicism that says life is not all troubadour love songs, mostpeople are observant enough to see that their acquaintances with thehighest level of moral idiocy are not the happiest. Besides, if you teachyour children to love, they may possibly love their parents, among others.Because parents teach what they have learned, it is not too likely thatnormally one comes into adolescence still having to learn that love is theright approach to a fulfilling sexual life. Perhaps more people learn duringadolescence, for the first time, that being ruthlessly seduced has its ad-vantages as well, that one does not have to stoke up a mood of lyric lovepoetry every single time.

Both these devices however concede the main point, that somehow the

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The Prisoners' Dilemma and Sociology 189

basic structure is really a prisoners' dilemma, and it is only the structureswhich encourage the cooperative solution that really work. Both basicallyargue that, external to the game itself, pressures are created to encouragethe socially optimal choice. But given that we come to the relevant part ofour life (or if we are unlucky, the relevant parts of our life) in social circles,and having been raised by parents who want us to be happy, our experi-ence of the erotic game itself normally teaches us to love rather than toexploit. Since love is a big thing in our lives, we experiment with variousways of playing it, fearfully and shyly or with exaggerated bravado at first,then with more confidence. Our experience with this process makes iteasy for us to accept Erik Erikson's model of individual development inwhich capacity to achieve intimacy comes after the solution to the prob-lem of ego identity, i.e. normally after adolescence. We experiment withshy and fearful ways of playing the erotic game, and they do not work. Wefind eventually that love does work. That is, all that social structure, socialcircles, and parental socialization, can do at best is to get us to try love,against perhaps our rational better judgment as reflected in the prisoners'dilemma quality of our adolescent rating and dating games. But on aday-to-day basis, given Erikson's caveat of normal personality develop-ment up to adolescence, it turns out that love is really better.

The friends who warn against seducers and the parents who want theirchildren to be able to love so they can be happy are more reporting theirown experience of what makes them happy, than they are solving adifficult dilemma whose dominant solution is a series of uncaring affairs.

Now let me turn to the opposite extreme from this uncomfortablyintimate field, and ask the question, 'Why do most people try to do theirjobs?' The answer Herbert Simon (as Chester Barnard before him) hassuggested is, 'Why not?' The basic argument in Simon's essay on a formaltheory of the employment relation is that if one has to work anyway, onemight as well do what the boss wants, if it is not too obnoxious. As long asteaching and research (and drafting this paper in the middle of the night)are within my zone of indifference, I might as well do them even if I havetenure. It is indeed an important sociological principle that if all mystudents competed directly with me for my job as soon as I had taughtthem, teaching them to be better than I am would not be within my zone ofindifference. Much of Max Weber's work on bureaucracy can be read asan essay on how to keep 'conflicts of interest' out of administrativeapparatuses, so that 'doing a good job' can be within the zone of indiffer-ence. But this suggests that one solution commonly used to prisoners'

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dilemmas is to have a paid official choose a strategy, and to set up theofficial's job so that his own fate does not depend on the payoff structure.Once such a system with a disinterested judge is set up, one can base thejudge's social honor or promotion chances on choosing the cooperativesolution, and the dilemma is solved.

The individual level dilemma that remains, once we have used a disin-terested third party to solve most dilemmas, is that each one is better off ifhe or she gets a salary without working, but all are worse off in a society ofslackers. The same structural protections that work in the marriage mar-ket also help prevent the psychopathic solution here, that a reputation as aslacker keeps one from getting jobs, and parents do not believe that lazychildren will have happier and more successful work lives. In addition, allthe complicated incentive wage systems, promotion by merit systems,conflict of interest provisions, and the like, are set up so that the behaviorthat is rational for the organization is both within the worker's zone ofindifference, and is the behavior within that zone that has the highestutility for the worker. Organizations often fail to secure that Utopian state,but they certainly go to great efforts so that the direct prisoners' dilemmais rarely posed in daily life.

But given all these structural provisions, what is our introduction towork life and work norms existentially like? It is that we start a new jobanxious to learn to do it well, we get disillusioned when it turns out that therace is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, and then, again withsome gentle cynicism perhaps, we try to do our jobs as best we can. Anadministrator is generally wise if he or she spends most of the timeremoving impediments and providing resources so that subordinates cando a good job, and making sure that they are at least not punished for it. Aswe go up the hierarchy, playing the game of work as if it were a prisoners'dilemma gets more and more damaging to the organization, yet fixedsalaries and effective tenure in the job make it more and more possible toconceal sloth. But if that actually happened, then the whole system forkeeping everyone at their jobs would break down. Professors are perhapsthe extreme case, for they could easily do nothing for high wages. Yetthere is always a new generation of trained professors, better trained infact than the last generation because in the meantime a great deal of goodresearch has been done and because that research has been responsiblytaught.

Not only is the prisoners' dilemma of work in an occupation solvedroutinely on a large scale, and solved in a capitalist society in which

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The Prisoners' Dilemma and Sociology 191

someone else gets the returns from extra effort; it is solved without everhaving been really faced in the daily experience of most of us.

The purpose of these two examples is to show that, even though love inmarriage and seriousness in work solve latent, unobservable, prisoners'dilemmas, people do not consciously solve them. But as Elster himself hasargued, such functional explanations are incomplete, and he urges thatthere is therefore no general reason to believe that the fact that love andseriousness 'have the function' of solving the game means that the func-tion accounts for them. Et tu quoque, Elster.

This is therefore a good place to go into the relation between latent,unobserved structures of situations and existential experience or manifestbehavior, the nodal point of functional theory. I would argue that in almostall Elster's examples, people who solve the prisoners' dilemma by havinga social relation do not consciously formulate the payoff structure. If thenElster's examples are illuminating, they are illuminating for the samereason that Malinowski's anxious Trobrianders setting out to sea pro-tected by canoe magic are illuminating. Just as I am not really willing togive up Malinowski for Elster, I am not willing to give up Elster thescientist of prisoners' dilemmas for Elster the logician.

To start with, what is the sense in which people are unconscious of thesegames? Clearly when one warns one's son about ruthless seductive wom-en only after his body, one is realizing that the game of erotic love can beplayed as if it had the prisoners' dilemma payoff structure. When oneadvises one's children not to be lazy, one realizes that playing the game ofthe labor market that way is a generally losing proposition. That is,whenever people need to know the latent payoff structure, they figure itout. In a psychologically similar way, when we need to instruct ourchildren in English grammar, we realize consciously that for example,animate verbs like 'think' do not go with inanimate subjects like 'hill', evenif we would not perhaps be able to formulate the rule until we had readChomsky.

What we have, then, is a contingent conscious motivation that followsJohn Dewey's rule, that one figures out solutions only when one hasproblems. When the analyst points to the dilemma of always losing ifeveryone plays as a seducer or as a lazy person, he or she is saying that thestructure of the situation is such that if people are not loving or serious,they will have problems, and the problems will cause them to behave (ifthey can) in such a way as to solve the game cooperatively. Malinowski'sTrobrianders were perfectly conscious that one loses people on the high

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seas, but not on lagoons. If they set out to sea not properly protected bymagic, they had a contingent consciousness that they had a problem. Sincethey could not solve it by building steamships, they did the best they couldwith canoe magic. When white men came with steamships, they quicklysaw that this was a better solution than canoe magic, just as the seduceroften loses out in the long run to the kindly dull lover because the seducedone realizes kindness is a better solution.

Contingent, Deweyan, pragmatist consciousness is exactly what is re-quired to complete the functional causal loop. It says that whenever astructure drifts away from its equilibrium, in such a way as to make lots ofpeople unhappy, they become conscious. They may only achieve whatLenin called 'trade union consciousness', and not that consciousnesswhich could alter the structure toward one giving a permanent solution.The Trobrianders do not necessarily get a rational solution, a steamship.Seducers or lazy people are not wiped out once and for all by the devices ofreputation and socialization. Or to put it another way, nothing in theargument makes the equilibrium well defined, as we are used to seeing ineconomics. Several different structures ('functional alternatives') may be'explained' by the same dilemma: trade unions or revolutionary parties,cautious young women or decent young men, a sense of craftsmanship orTaylorism, canoe magic or steamships. The reason is that since the re-verse causal process set in motion by the tension is conscious and notnecessarily structurally constrained as in a market, it can have severaloutcomes. The defining characteristic of an equilibrium in a functionalargument is that it does not create in individuals such problems as makethem conscious that some alternatives are better.

Further, since the mechanism by which structural tensions get trans-lated into individual problems is not specified above (it is vague in Dewey,too), whether such a functional causal loop will exist in any particular caseis problematic. Presumably the more important an area of life is to people,the more likely they will become conscious of problems in that area, so sexand work are good candidates for functional explanations. For a functionalexplanation to be valid, as Elster has argued, one has to demonstrate thatthere is indeed a reverse causal link, natural selection or Deweyan con-tingent consciousness or whatever. The a priori position in social scienceshould probably be Lenin's, that people who have problems due to struc-tural strains are pretty clever, but not as clever as we, which is why afunction is often latent for them but as clear as a prisoners' dilemma to us.

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