Playing Against Children
Often times people find small children hard to control. We ask them to do one thing and they deliberately do the opposite, or no amount of coaxing seems to sway the minds once they have made a decision. Perhaps there could be a better strategy of interacting with children that helps people reach their goal. One key aspect of Game Theory is to understand the other player’s perspective. The tables we construct in class have values with relative gains or losses, and we must remember that everything the player considers is reflected in that sum. If someone is more satisfied when other people do as well, that is already reflected in their relative number, so there is no need to adjust the number for additional factors. Naturally, we’d like to think that going to bed early is a win-win for both the child and the adult, but clearly this is not the case if we have trouble putting them to bed. In the child’s perspective, they simply might not want to, and as the opposing player in this game, we need to realize this before trying to make a move.
So instead of simply telling a child that they need to do something, we can impose conditions and consequences. With certain conditions, the children will also weigh their options and hopefully choose the one that we’d like them to choose. For example, instead of waiting for siblings to decide on a bed time story, or trying to facilitate their arguments, a parent can set a time and give the rules that if they agree on a book, they get to have a bed time story. Else, no one will get to read a book. Now let’s take a look at this from the children’s point of view. They are playing against each other. Although it may depend on the child, we can assume that any story is better than no story for both of them. Here we will have two Nash Equilibrium — one of them gives in an agrees on a the other’s story. Now the parent can get the children to bed in a timely manner thanks to some extra thought.
As long as we can assess the situation accurately by thinking from the children’s perspective and combine it with some Game Theory, imposing rules using the authority we have can serve as great shortcuts in our conflicts.
Source:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/game-theory-secrets-for-parents-1405005848