Captain America vs. Iron Man, The Superhero’s Dilemma
Sometimes superheroes must make the toughest decisions. For us students, it could be a game between a late assignment and a failed exam. For superheroes, it could be a game that’s the difference between life and death. Heroes are the safeguards to protect the little guy or to save thousands of lives from supernatural incidents, such as an alien snapping his finger. Whatever the case, superheroes are icons that we ordinary mortals look up to and hope to learn from their example. However, sometimes even superheroes have their differing ideologies and internal conflicts. As some superheroes are human, they fall under the human fallacies of internal conflict as well. In Captain America: Civil War, both Iron Man (Tony Stark) and Captain America (Steve Rodgers) make their stand in how they approach saving lives and administering justice. Since they have come to different terms in how they want to work together to save the world, Stark and Rodgers clashed to create a civil war.
This leads to the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma problem between the two heroes. With Captain America believing more in the freedom of superheroes and Iron Man believing in accountability, the two clash in the movie. This leads to our dilemma, where both heroes have the option of fighting each other as opponents or talking together as friends.
As marked by the underline in the Prisoner’s Dilemma table above, the dominant strategy for both heroes is to fight. Since talking out has a huge payoff if they fight and no payoff if they talk, talking is not encouraged in this game. Despite the 4, 4 payoffs in talking it out, the best strategy is to always fight in this game. If any of them talk it out, they lose the fight and the aggressor has a huge payoff. Therefore, both Captain America and Iron Man fight in the movie, and they both receive a diminished payoff as they both split apart. This diminished payoff is clear when the next major movie, Infinity War comes around since they had much less communication between the two superhero groups.
Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220485.2018.1438861