The Case for Empathy by Game Theory
A recurring theme amongst scholars in various fields of study is that the theories used to back up analyses of real-world phenomena are never complete. What that means is no matter how true a theory seems to be there is always an incongruent case within the universe, whether it’s in your awareness or not. One instance where human behavior is inherently abstracted to make predictions is in game-theory; yet, it continues to improve upon its principles to more accurately model the relationships that exist in society.
One practical aspect of human behavior is empathy: touted as a critical skill in personal development I believe most people place little to no emphasis in practice within their daily lives. There are many epistemological and social reasons for why it seems to be this way and for the most part it’s because people are clumsy when it comes to introspection. Often people think they are introspecting when in reality they are deluding themselves into feeling better. What ends up happening is that empathy becomes another form of self-interest without the person even realizing what they are doing to themselves. Although I believe an individual solution for developing empathy is to elevate one’s consciousness, research proving the beneficial implications of empathy may be more valuable as a marketing tool for its practicality at a societal and even global scale.
In addition, empathy assists in negotiation which is another skill everyone should develop as it leads to more results within one’s personal life without causing too many unforeseeable problems. A major root to negotiation is the ability to empathize and typically with more empathy, success in negotiation rises. Recently, Joshua Plotkin and Arunas Radzvilavicius of the University of Pennsylvania and Alexander Stewart of the University of Houston published research using game-theory driven models to show that more empathy leads to cooperation rather than selfishness. The trouble with empathy is that its subjectivity is rooted in the strong tendencies for moral imposition and many previous models discussing why people cooperate were based on a binary description of people’s morality: good or bad. “‘In large, modern societies, people disagree a lot about each other’s moral reputations’ Plotkin says”, whereas in prior research cooperation broke down because people disapproved of the other person’s reputation (good versus bad), “they decided to incorporate empathy, [which] entails the ability to understand the perspective of another person” (1). Plotkin and company found from their studies that “when populations were empathetic, stern judging was the best at promoting cooperation” (1). Not to mention, from an evolutionary standpoint they discovered that when populations were not empathetic, behavior shifted over time so that empathy became more widespread and stable. What does this mean for the world? For one, it means that “stern judging” may have a legitimate mathematical equivalent. When we think about it most of game theory predicts specific outcomes in specific situations and even when extrapolated to speak about larger populations the characteristics of the game stay limited. By modeling cooperation as a function of empathy, it can be conceptually integrated into both more and less complicated games to make them more realistic. Algorithms in social networks could be manipulated to incorporate empathy or cooperation creating more precise versions of strength in relationships and balance in the overall network. The implications are far-reaching.
The game theory gets more complicated than what has been taught so far in class as the researchers used a combination of second-order payoff matrices and strategies based on complex probability to establish their conclusions. Although theoretically, almost all my negotiations involve some combination of cooperation or defection if the behavior becomes abstracted enough. The researchers “model of moral assessment” that underlies each individual in the populations happened to be just that: “a special case of the prisoner’s dilemma…[called] one-shot donation games” (2). Each game or interaction within a population of individuals involved the ability (as the observer) to choose to pay the cost of altruism (donate) or defect to incur no cost depending on the doner’s strategy S = (p, q) where p and q denote the probability the donor will cooperate with a “bad” or “good” person respectively. Something different from the games we study in class is that the structure to this game allowed the individuals to differ in their opinions of one another. An interesting note is that the researchers concluded that high-level moral evaluations within the games are reserved for more intelligent individuals so second-order “social-norms” would be sufficient in encapsulating the majority of donation-games. In the study, empathy was regarded as the probability that you will use the doner’s view of your reputation when applying a second-order norm to update the doner’s reputation (2). Basically, every individual in the population has both the capacity to observe the game and participate in the game.
Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about game theory to speak on the mathematical results that were generated describing the conclusions I stated in the previous paragraph. Proving the ubiquity of good behavior with game theory is the more fascinating conclusion to me.
sources:
(1) https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/empathy-and-cooperation-go-hand-hand
(2) https://elifesciences.org/articles/44269