Mutually beneficial cooperation often fails to arise among rational individuals

Evidence

The point, though, is not only that we may lack that basic form of cooperation which nurtures beneficial competition, as is often the case in underdeveloped countries. Nor is it just that we have competition where the majority would prefer cooperation, the international relations between superpowers being the foremost example (Hinde 1986). We may simply have the lack of mutually beneficial cooperation, with nothing to replace it. Game theory has provided us with a better understanding of why cooperation may not be forthcoming even when it would benefit most of those involved. As Binmore and Dasgupta put it in their survey of the subject: ‘It is a major and fundamental error to take it for granted that because certain cooperative behaviour will benefit every individual in a group, rational individuals will adopt this behaviour’ (1986: 24). Irrespective of individual rationality and motivation, cooperation may still fail to take place. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2690

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s core thesis mapping Saramago’s blindness epidemic to collapsed cooperation; traces to game theory cooperation failures that Blindness dramatizes. — connects to: Rational collectivities form through imperfect local commitment, not achieved perfection. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2369; Mutualistic reciprocity succeeds where individual competition would fail under stress — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1009; Collective action against inflation fails because individual restraint could serve it equally. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 148