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The Science of Strategic Thinking: Shift Your Mindset to “Win-Win”, with Kevin Zollman, Game Theorist and Co-author, The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting
Aim for mutual cooperation
One of the things that game theory has really shown us through recent study has been interactions that we oftentimes think of as zero-sum, or competitive, are not as competitive as they seem. So in situations like in the Cold War, which most people thought had to be a zero-sum game if anything is, we discovered that there were actually opportunities for mutual cooperation. Arms reduction treaties are a great example. The US and the USSR figured out that if they could find a way to cooperate they could both save an enormous amount of money and effort by reducing the number of weapons that they had. So something that we initially thought was zero-sum, a purely competitive interaction, became an interaction that was beneficial, or at least where there were possibilities of benefit, for both parties. So one of the fundamental insights of game theory is even if you feel like it’s a zero-sum game, there are oftentimes opportunities where both parties can come out on top. So if I’m talking to my boss wanting to ask for a raise, it might feel zero-sum – of course, every dollar that the boss spends on me is money that the boss doesn’t have to spend on something else. But oftentimes you can come to mutually beneficial agreements because you can say, “Look, here’s the thing that I do for the company that’s good. And so here’s why the company paying me more to keep me – or to keep me happier, at least – might benefit the company in return.” And so I think one of the most fundamental developments of game theory was a move that happened very early, from the analysis of so-called zero-sum games to an analysis of games where cooperation was possible.
What I do in my personal life, and I think almost everyone can do in their personal life, is to try to think: in this interaction, what outcome would be good for both parties, and how can we achieve that outcome? And by thinking about everything in that way, we often transform something that seems like a situation where there has to be a winner and there has to be a loser into one where nobody feels like they’ve lost and everybody benefits.
Make trust feasible
The thing that’s tricky, and the thing that’s one of the major developments in game theory in this area, is sometimes those situations where both parties can benefit end up being unenforceable. There are promises that I can make, but where I might have an incentive to break my promises later. For instance, if I promise a stranger on the street, “Give me $10 right now and I’ll pay you $20 tomorrow,” no stranger is going to agree because they know there’s no way for them to enforce that agreement. They’ll never see me again – they have no way to know that I’ll come back and give them $20. So one of the things that game theory has studied is when you have situations like that, where you have two people who want to cooperate but they each don’t trust one another, how can we redesign the game, so to speak, the interaction, in a way that can make what initially seems like a deal that you could never enforce into a deal that you could enforce? One way is to make sure that we will meet again, or that this opportunity might come up again. So try to create a situation that increases the probability that I’ll meet that stranger again. The stranger can find out where I live or where I work. The stranger can arrange to find out who my friends are, or something like that. Some way that the stranger can make sure that this opportunity arises again. Same thing can happen in our personal interactions. When you find that you’re trying to cooperate with somebody but you each distrust one another, creating the opportunity for future interaction is one of the principle ways that we can make trust feasible.