Garett Jones: belief

Transcript context

…In your view, why are smarter groups of people more cooperative, on average? I think, partly, it’s for reasons that come out of Axelrod. So Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation really had a huge influence on how I think about the hive mind. The three traits that turned out to be especially crucial are what I call the three Ps of the repeated prisoner’s dilemma, the RPD. It turns out that intelligent people are more patient, they are more pleasant, and they are more perceptive. In order to get good cooperation in groups, it helps to have people who are focused on the long run, who are willing to take a little risk today in order to get back some return to their cooperation in the future, so they need to be more patient. They need to be more pleasant. They need to be more willing to start off cooperating, to take a chance on cooperation early in the game. It turns out, experiments showed that they, in fact, do that on average. And they need to be more perceptive. They need to keep track of the fact that they’re playing a game and that there are payoffs happening. Remembering the history of a game — and life is a game in many ways — is important to generating cooperation. So smarter people tend to have all three traits in greater degree: more patient, more perceptive, more pleasant. And those three Ps of the repeated prisoner’s dilemma are crucial for group cooperation. In some studies, the personality psychology trait called conscientiousness doesn’t seem to predict cooperation at all. Why is that? How do you make sense of that result?…

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