A study at Bonn and Maastricht Universities has shown that vindictiveness doesn’t usually pay:
A person inclined to deal with inequity on a tit-for-tat basis tends to experience more unemployment than other people….
Anyone who prefers to act according to the Old Testament motto of “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” has on average less friends – and is clearly less than satisfied with his or her life.
What do you think — can tit-for-tat be a good philosophy? Is Jesus’ teaching better (that when someone does something bad to you, turn the other cheek and do good to them)? Or is there a middle way?
Revenge is an evolved trait, so it may be useful in some instances.
Then again, our societies evolved much faster than our biology.
In general, while individual revenge can be of limited usefulness for the society, it is detrimental for the individual enacting it.
It is a negative, irrational emotion that consumes the individual.
In most but the extreme contextes, revenge is detrimental for the individual, while forgiving creates positive feelings [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevation_(psychology)#Elevation ] and in general leads to be happier.
Following the line of toughts of Francesco, I think individual revenge may be of great value for the society.
Let’s say a member of a primitive society tends to do harm -in any way- to the rest of group’s members. If all said members are “turning the other cheek”, he may not have a punishment and he may persist on his behaviour. So the existence of a little number of vindictive members can act as a “brake” for those harmful members, or even expell them from the group.
I agree that it is detrimental for the individual, but still it could be good for the group -when limited to a few members
That picture looks suspiciously like Islamic Rage Boy after a good shave…
LOL… I wonder what he’s been up to lately?
This should of been posted under ncloud’s response below this one. My bad.
I disagree. If someone killed my daughter, I wouldn’t think it moral for his punishment to be I get to kill his daughter.
But I think some scholars consider the eye for an eye to be more about equal punishment under the law in the sense that, previously, the murder of a king was punished harsher than the murder of a slave. This was trying to level the playing field in a socioeconomic class sense. A slave’s eye wasn’t worth any less than a king’s eye.
If a man kills your daughter, his crime isn’t against you – it’s against your daughter. Therefore, by “eye for an eye” logic, it should be him that dies, not your daughter. Not that I agree with all that fire and brimstone crap, you understand.
Good point.
I may be wrong, but I thought the “eye-for-an-eye” teaching in the OT was about the equal distribution of justice — i.e., the punishment must match the crime, it may be neither more nor less. I personally think that’s a pretty solid principle.
TIT FOR TAT (in all caps) was the name of a famous program which fmously outperformed other programs in a computer simulation of the Game Theory “Game” called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma”.
For a full explanation of the program, the contest, and TIT FOR TAT’s implications for co-evolution of species and co-operation in nature, you should read the book “Complexity” by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
In short… the winning strategy in life seems to be a “Tough but Fair” consistent approach, in which you approach strangers with trust, consistently punish any breach of that trust, and consistently restore trust when it is re-earned.
Note that I used “consistent” three times in that description. That seems to be where humans tend to fudge things up. Lower organisms kick our asses when it comes to consistency, and I think that’s because they can’t rationalize stupidity like we can.
Yes, you beat me to it! Tit-for-tat worked in a real performance test against other programs. I might call it the short version for being ready to trust and let bygones be bygones, I think my favorite part of it, that people don’t practice, is also being ready to fight if needed, without picking fights.
“eye for an eye” is really just tort law. expressed barbarically, perhaps, but tort law nonetheless.
I tend to be nice to people regardless of their attitude. Not always, and only up to a point, but if someone is a jerk, I usually don’t feel any need to retaliate. It works nicely for me and, I think, keeps a lot of unneeded stress from my life. I also don’t believe that good deeds all need to be rewarded… or returned. If I give someone a gift or do a favor for them, I really don’t expect something in return. I’m giving or doing because I WANT to, not because I want something from them.
I do agree that “the punishment should fit the crime” but I don’t think that necessarily applies to inter-personal relationships.
A person inclined to deal with inequity on a tit-for-tat basis tends to experience more unemployment than other people….
Those were the people who got caught. You’ve got to be subtle enough to ensure that the revenge can’t be traced back to you.
Somewhere in the middle. If an idiot is picking a fight or slandering you, revenge is the equivelent of wrestling a pig. You get dirty and they enjoy it.
The same goes for holding onto hate for someone who has wronged you. That is like drinking poison and hoping your enemy dies.
With all of that said, if some dude walks up and punches me in the face, he needs to prepare himself to endure the ass kicking of a lifetime.
Nicely put, BEattitude.
“Likes this”
Jerry: “Oh, the best revenge is living well.”
George: “Well, there’s no chance of that!”
Wouldn’t this be a game theory kind of thing? If EVERYONE plays that way, it can be a good system. IF not, you won’t have as many chances, because people will keep the behavior and head to places without the penalties.
That said, I think its context dependent. Also, I think its often used in lieu of other avenues. Like at work if you roll that way before giving formalized structures a try…
Is Jesus’ teaching better (that when someone does something bad to you, turn the other cheek and do good to them)?
Kudos for posing the question and posing it honestly.
And one more thing, there are a variety of ways to interpret Jesus here. It isn’t necessarily a full-out endorsement of pacifism, in other words.
Decent article on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_the_other_cheek
Isn’t it amazing just how ‘open to interpretation’ all of your beliefs are?
I know, it’s almost like they are opinions, no more supported or justified than anything else.
Gosh, it almost seems as if Christians are allowed to think about what to believe :-)
This backs up a theoretical result obtained via Game Theory back in the 1980s, or possibly the early 1990s. I’d love to cite this, but it was something I read in Discover magazine pre-Internet (this was before the magazine turned to garbage; it may or may not have recovered from the dumbing down by now).
As I recall, the result came out of a competition for mathematicians for an iterative version of Prisoner’s Dilemma; originally, they matched up the submitted algorithms at random, and the winner was the one with the highest total score after some predetermined number of matches. But then it occurred to them to try doing some selection modeling — specifically, if an algorithm produced low scores for too long, it would be removed from the running.
(A little explanation: Prisoner’s Dilemma is a mathematical “game” in which two players make a choice whether or not to cooperate with each other. The outcomes are usually expressed as numerical scores, which vary depending on who’s writing the description, but the scores are always arranged in the following order from highest to lowest: {you do not cooperate, the other player does}, {both of you cooperate}, {neither of you cooperate}, {you cooperate, the other player does not}. Which is to say: you are apparently rewarded for betraying the other player, and punished for being betrayed, but it’s better for both of you to trust than for both of you to betray. In the natural selection iterative version of the game, algorithms whose average score was not higher than the bottom two were culled every so often and replaced by copies of still-competing algorithms, but I forget the exact numerical details. I think there was also a randomly introduced “communication error” which would reverse a decision, but I may be imagining that.)
As I recall, the end result was that the overall best strategy in the long run was a fairly complicated one: always cooperate if the other player cooperated last time, but do not cooperate if the other player has betrayed you some percentage of the last few rounds, but occasionally cooperate at random even if the other player has been betraying. (Again, I forget the exact mathematical details. There may also have been an occasional random betrayal; I forget.) Blind cooperation — which was referred to as “suckers” — tended to get eliminated fairly early on, but blind betrayal also did not last — after the “sucker” algorithms got eliminated, the algorithms which did not cooperate as a matter of policy would kill each other off.
The relevant point here is that direct tit-for-tat algorithms did poorly; they only worked as long as the other algorithm would always cooperate; the “communications error” would end up killing any combination of tit-for-tat algorithms as they both went back and forth “returning” the betrayal. Modified tit-for-tat algorithms which occasionally forgave the other player did better.
(Of course, in a sense this is a total distortion of Prisoner’s Dilemma — the whole point of it in Game Theory is that a description of a game is complete in and of itself, and does not iterate, and for that matter, the scores are supposed to be exact rankings of the full implications of the outcome. But as a model for a single round of modeling, this design was not entirely a bad basis.)
One problem is that game theory searches for the most rational strategy. Experiments with actual people demonstrates that they are not rational.
Yep. as I said in my above comment, lower organisms (like Insects and Plants) have us beat when it comes to consistently reacting to a stimulus. The Human “X Factor”, while making life interesting, has its detrimental side.
“The relevant point here is that direct tit-for-tat algorithms did poorly”
This is a bit confusing. The algorithm that won, hands down, was *named* TIT FOR TAT (caps original, not for emphasis) see my above comment for a short description.
The idiomatic phrase “tit for tat” can certainly be vague, but you have actually described the program by that name pretty well. It didn’t do poorly, though; it won.
An interesting note about this program/algorithm is that it did so overwhelmingly well that a second tournament was launched, with programmers specifically designing their programs to beat TIT FOR TAT, and it turned out to be unbeatable.
TIT FOR TAT (and also TIT FOR TAT with Forgiveness in some cases) is the most winning strategy in the Prisoners’ Dilemma game, but this game is not representative of all (or even many) real scenarios.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
Also TIT FOR TAT strategy requires — not just for effectiveness but even mere possibility — that the game to be iterated / repeated N+1 times, which is also not realistic.
There are pre-requisite’s to one’s ability to completely “turn the cheek” as it were. First, one must know with certainty who he or she is at their core, must know their spiritual paternity. This allows for the necessary humility wherein one’s identity is no longer rooted in the false self, but in the true. The other is that the dominant virtue of love will have been adequately worked into the one offended prior to the offending incident which will empower (yes, love is a power indeed) him or her to love the offender more than his or her own life (identity, reputation) no longer feeling it necessary to protect or defend it.
With these two firmly established within (true identity & love) we can now be who we really are both to ourselves and to all others. At this point, offense merely becomes an opportunity to demonstrate our’s and our Fathers true and loving nature.
I speak from experience….love to all.
Read Axelrod’s “The Evolution of Cooperation.” He spends the entire book dissecting this very question. It was one of the few books I read in grad school that I would even consider reading again.
I am on a library computer, so I just went and checked it out. It’s going home with me.
From my experience at the shitty jobs I’ve had every time I demanded equal treatment it wound up getting me fired. But I personally believe its more the result of the professionalism of the job in question. In unskilled labor, or other minimum wage jobs, people are disposable and are treated as such. There is very little motivation for managers not to play favorites, especially if the benefits are under the table or off the clock.
It’s harder to get away with that kind of thing in higher paying positions because as skills and knowledge become more and more specialized a replacement becomes harder and harder to find. For high level jobs ensuring the happiness of employees is more about reinvesting in the organization than it is about treating people well simply because its the right thing to do.
…and that is one of my biggest complaints about capitalism.
@phrankygee: either my memory is faulty — always a possibility — or else there was a secondary contest where the specific algorithm you’re talking about actually did lose. I remember specifically that the long-term best algorithm involved a slight probability of random forgiveness. I also remember that the second contest, in which your sort of thing failed, included the original algorithms as well; my recollection is that it failed against the the combination of new and existing submissions.
By the way: neither contest was really Prisoner’s Dilemma, strictly speaking. Prisoner’s Dilemma is specifically defined to be a one-round deal, so there are really only two strategies in Prisoner’s Dilemma: trust or betray. Once you start doing multiple rounds and keeping track of history, the game is irretrievably altered.
Yes, the game is not a *true* prisoner’s dilemma. It is, in my opinion, much more representative of real life, in which you interact with entities more than once. And it is especially an appropriate contest for looking into evolutionary implications, in which genetically coded long-term tendencies are more important than one-off interactions.
I am reading the book that Khan recommended above right now, so I will be a little smarter about all this stuff in a couple of days. I hope.