Random signals can crystallize into stable cooperation through learned signaling conventions
Evidence
Take, for instance, the cooperation of ‘live and let live’ which flourished between enemy soldiers in the First World War (Axelrod 1984). This might be accounted for in various ways. It may have arisen as the result of a soldier shooting — out of distraction, boredom, or nervousness -— at some clearly non-human target in the opposite trench. Or it may be that soldiers on both sides stopped shooting at regular intervals because they happened to have their meals at the same hours of the day. Such random signals may eventually have been ‘interpreted’ by one side as an inclination on the other towards an implicit truce, and they may have responded with other signals; first just to test for possible misunderstandings, then with increasing conviction, until the exchange slowly assumed the features of a stable cooperative abstention from mutual injury. Furthermore, what may have emerged accidentally can subsequently be /earned, and soldiers apparently learned several ways of signalling to the ‘enemy’ their predisposition to cooperate. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2789
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The trench ‘live and let live’ case operationalizes exactly how cooperation (trust) could arise in Saramago’s novel absent prior trust — the mechanism by which the doctor’s wife’s directives become accepted.
- SEED: An essay angle: how ‘live and let live’ micro-cooperation in WWI trenches mirrors the ad-hoc norms that emerge in Saramago’s quarantine — cooperation as emergent signal-reader, not pre-existing virtue.
Related
- Live-and-let-live truces emerged from random signals, not prior trust (similarity 0.94)
- WWI trench cooperation emerged from random signals interpreted over time (similarity 0.93)