Religion: an escape from prisoner’s dilemma

When I spoke at the World Religions Forum at the University of Chicago in ’16 and ’17 I had admittedly confessed that I saw Hinduism as the ‘Hufflepuff’ of religions. I understood it as a way of life, more than a doctrine of intellectual regulation, which afforded me the ability to maintain my belief in its traditions while choosing to be more open minded about its Gods. This, I believe, provides me a unique vantage point of loving religion, traditions, its teachings while being guiltfree and unafraid as I view the contents of God and Religion under a critical microscope

What started this analysis?

I, being married to a devout athiest, have had ample opportunities to argue for the benefits of religions, both organized and benign (I kid). An argument I often make is: just because a tool has been used for bad purposes, doesn’t mean the tool is bad. It just means it was in the wrong hands. All we can do is raise people that will use the tools effectively. For example, science has been used to blow up cities, but it has also been used to treat disease. All we can do is vote-in a congress focused on wellbeing over war.

And in similar fashion, I usually lay out the benefits of religion which follow along the lines of

• Outsourcing thinking about unanswerable questions of life
  • This is not a always bad thing. Who wants existential angst?
• Outsourcing liability of decisions
  • This is not always a bad thing, either. We make many mistakes in life. We can’t feel responsible for all of them, otherwise we’d never move.
• A Community held together by similar value systems
  • It is not a mean feat to keep many people tied together over a long period of time. I’ll talk about this more in detail later

Recently as I watched a youtube video on game theory, I thought of another very mathematical way to convince my husband of the benefits of religion. So I couldn’t wait to lay it out on paper

Prisoners’ dilemma

A prisoner’s dilemma is a situation where individual decision-makers always have an incentive to choose in a way that creates a less than optimal outcome for all the individuals of the group.

Eg: Two criminal gang members (A and B) are imprisoned with no means of communicating with each other. Simultaneously, they are each offered a bargain: betray your fellow prisoner by spilling the beans on them or stay loyal by remaining silent. They are each told that:

• If A and B both stay loyal, both of them will serve only 1 year in prison.
• If A betrays B but B remains loyal, A will be set free and B will serve 10 years in prison
• If A remains loyal but B betrays A, A will serve 10 years in prison and B will be set free
• If A and B both betray the other, each of them serves 3 years in prison

Here, think about humans as pure logic machines (which I understand that they are not, we’ll come back to that). If A and B don’t really know each other: no matter what B does, the best option for A, optimizing for his own benefit, is to Betray. Meaning if B stays loyal, A should betray so he gets 0 years in prison instead of 1. If B betrays, A should also betray so he gets 3 years in prison instead of 10. So in all eventualities, A will choose to betray and same for B thus both of them getting 3 years in prison everytime instead of 1 year in prison.

Now I know what you’re thinking, what if they trusted each other? What if they cared about each other?

That example is easiest to judge if we say that both prisoners were brothers or mother-daughter or some nature of relationship like that. In that case, A, a mother in this case, is actually thinking about what her actions would do to her daughter. She is optimizing for B’s outcome instead of her own. So if B, the daughter, betrays A will want to stay loyal to minimize the fallout for B. B does the same and both end up getting the best output here: 1 year in prison each.

But this is blatently an act of self-sacrifice – the mother willing to spend 10 years in prison for her daughter’s freedom. This thought process cannot be expected from a general member of the public. For the nicest strangers the only reason that they will NOT betray someone is because they ‘know’ without a doubt that other will not betray them either.

As we can see, then the goal of our discussion going forward is to reach the (1,1) prison sentence among people/groups who barely know each other. This is where Religion comes in

Religion vs Societal niceties

Some of you are thinking, what if I’m just a nice person? Well, then why are you in prison? Jk jk… You’re thinking I’ll always choose to stay loyal. The concern here isn’t that you are nice, its how do you ‘know’ that the other person is ‘just as nice’? And how do they know you’re nice? Because you spending 10 years in prison for being nice means we’ve failed in achieving our goal, also it will be very uncomfortable for you. So much so, that now you would choose to betray everytime this game is presented to you again.

So what if everyone is nice? Easier said than done. Actually, being nice is not difficult when there isn’t a challenge. Most suburban neighbors would qualify as ‘nice’. But let’s diagnose the cause of this niceness.

Most of us, especially those living in western societies, are fiercely independent and abhor any societal norm that curtails our freedom of actions. Admittedly, the crux of the idea being ‘I will do what I want, as long as I don’t actively hurt you’. We must ackowledge, that this creates a sort of floating existence of loosely connected friendships. We actively avoid commenting on others’ clothers we don’t like, their life decisions we don’t agree with or their behavioral patterns that affect those around them negatively.

This decision to avoid conflict makes for very nice conversations but also limited interactions/openness. We’d rather reduce contact with them than ‘correct’ them and in doing so, become ‘not nice’. And rightly so, because who are we to correct someone? They are free to choose.

The result of this though, is a lack of a tightly coupled value structure, where predicting behavioral patterns is difficult, especially if you haven’t spent a long time with them. This does not mean that we, as young-western generations, don’t have value structures. No! It means our value structures are more customized making them more difficult to predict. Meaning someone who is open to the idea of open marriages might hurt or be hurt by their semi-serious date who finds the idea apalling and a betrayal of trust. Or a fierce believer in the sanctity of life may not understand their daughter’s decison to end one regardless of cause.

You’d say here, I could just clarify my views right off the bat – how many of your everchanging views are you able to communicate without driving someone away? And remember, this game is essentially a game of minimum explanation.

However, a person who sees rosary beads in your hands ‘knows’ that you believe in the same 10 commandments as them with much gusto. It forms an immediate matrix of behavioral patters knowing you’re afraid of the same judgement and hellfire as they are. So your actions are more predictable.

In fact the more niche a religion and its external ‘identifiers’ (Hijab, sindoor, turban, habit, etc) the quicker a fellow-follower is able to predict behavior through their shared value structure.

For the purpose of our goals, in this game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, predicatability is key. You can’t just be nice, they other person also needs to be convinced of your niceness and in return has to agree to be nice.

Application in the real world

What I have tried to establish so far is as follows:

1. Why a prisoner’s dilemma is difficult to break without the ability to predict behavior
2. Why religion makes it easy to predict behavior (or atleast the perception thereof) – not implying that religious folks have the ‘nicest’ behavior all the time.

Now, let’s try to map it to soceity. In society we’re trying to break the prisoner’s dilemma all the time! Where there is shared costs but individual benefits, the behavioral pattern usually makes a prisoner’s dilemma. For example, this happens all the time when the management of an apartment complex increases maintenance fees for the complex from time to time to hire cleaners because a few people have left the pool dirty. Few people here are reaping benefits of ‘not having to clean the pool’, while everyone has to pay the increased maintenance fees. And since everyone is paying extra fees, everyone thinks it is okay to leave the pool dirty for cleaners to take care of, thus making the increase in maintenance fee permanent. There we’ve done it: The Prisoner’s dilemma has been lost and we’re all in the (3,3) outcome where the increased maintenance fees are now a default. We could have all been in the lower maintenance fee scenario if everyone had pulled their weight (1,1) and trusted that others will too. Doping in sports, Climate change action can all be explained as Prisoner’s dilemma where there is more direct incentive to be selfish than cooperative.

That is one of the reasons why we’ll try to find people like ourself when we look for apartments, so we know what to expect. Again, predictability of behavior is key.

Now how does this play out with religion in the real world – to quote Aristotle “There are many ways to miss the mark, but only one way to hit it”. Which is to say, I don’t know. We have data that suggests that the top 5 ‘safest‘ countries are near homogenous countries (Qatar, UAE, Oman, Taiwan, Isle of man – either religious or cultural homogeniety), but this could also be because of stricter punishments in such countries. There isn’t really an index that shows stronger alliances between countries of the same religion, either, but safe to assume that countries with fewer degrees of separation between state and religion have their foreign policy impacted significantly by religious ideology. <I’m very open to any ideas on how I can analyze this theory!>

But at a more personal level – it is easier to relate the sentiment that if a person is as similar to me as possible, I’m able to predict their pattern. Additionally, if I am around a person in multiple settings over long periods of time, I’m able to predict their patters as well. Religions provide both these things. A literal textbook, usually, that help align followers ideologically as well habitually. In turn enabling them to be in closer contact for longer through sunday mass or weekend pathshalas (Jains).

Again, I must emphasize that I am not recommending religion but the idea that a shared, ‘explicit‘ set of beliefs helps establish a strong enough bond to help us overcome selfishness and think about the broader community or greater good. Historically this has been done by religion and in more recent years, federal/state laws have provided some of those ethical frameworks. But I do believe that it is important that we drive toward a point in time in the future where we find a way to share the value structure that defines our day to day life and be malleabe to align it with the rest of the world to once and for all, break the dilemma and land in (1,1)