Axelrod's work was also summarized in The Selfish Gene. (And more recently, in Behave, by Sapolsky.)
From the abstract:
"We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival."
[1] https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/robert-axelrod/the-evoluti...
https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Winning-Catherine-Gale/dp/B07XHPW...
I've never been a fan of this framing. Cooperation can be viewed selfishly when the cooperation occurs because of well informed and strategic parties in the cooperation. A great example of this in real life are cartels. Cartels are only cooperative to the point where it optimizes a stable level/equilibrium of selfishness. Most cartels would happily disband and pull all the gains but the participants realize their minimal cooperation results in the best outcomes for themselves.
I guess the main issue I have with this boils down to the underlying intent and framing of intent. Ultimately, the intent is still driven entirely by selfishness, it's just selfishness with strategy and realizing that sometimes taking everything you can from everyone won't always navigate you to your selfish goal-state.
Perhaps that's what you mean here by "pure" selfishness not working. I'd argue that pure selfishness is the intent to only do what's minimally required for others for self-gain. You can be strategic or instrategic about it.
Something like "altruistic" cooperation on the other hand creates cooperation for the sake of cooperation alone (building trust, social cohesion, stability for more people). There may be little or nothing to gain for the cooperation for some participants, perhaps even some lose by participating (knowingly or unknowingly), but the cooperation as whole benefits and those benefits are worth the costs to the participants. The cooperation may exist to help some other party with no expectation of reciprocation. I think of it like a potluck dinner: everyone brings a dish and everyone gets to eat and have a good time. Some may not bring a dish and that's fine, they still eat and gain and others know that's the case, meanwhile some may fix elaborate dishes, expensive in terms of preparation time/complexity and/or ingredients and they do so knowing they're going over and above and won't necessarily be rewarded (perhaps a compliment) but they do so anyways because they wish to share the dish or experience with others.
It's relevant in every day life: human interaction often fits the schema of the prisoner's dilemma, the signalling game or the chicken game. That tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemmata matches intuition about human cooperation.
The theory is beautiful, easy to understand and leads to verifiable predictions, especially in the context of evolution, such as the competition between genes, the behaviour of parasites, allocation of resources in a tribe, mating rituals, etc.
It certainly doesn't match my intuition because it's a quite mechanistic view of things. But speaking in mathematical terms, I have the suspicion that it's a solution for a very specific situation that generalizes with negative side-effects to social life. In any case, I've read that governments use this strategy when it comes to foreign affairs.
Most people have a very simple view of the nature of politics, and therefore, tend to think the people charge are out to get them in some way, when really, they're just operating under some kind of game that forces their hand to make difficult decisions. By understanding a little game theory, a person might at least be able to better understand what's going on, if not even influence the odds in their favor.
Obviously, ordinary people might not want to play this game, but the game will still play with you.
This video is a good rundown of that for government, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
One analogy is shifting from a blame culture — why did that one person do that thing? — to a blameless postmortem: what is it about this system of individual actions that leads to this outcome? How did we get here? What mechanisms and incentives would repeat it? What would change it?
But caution: game theory is not about winning games, but finding equilibria. You might be more interested in behavioral game theory (how people learn the games, k-level thinking etc) if you want to get a leg up.
This. However, if you understand the equilibrium for some behaviour, you can understand what would it take to change the behaviour.
I use this in my startup where we create an equilibrium for dentists to provide reliable dental care. And, it actually works.
For a great introduction from this point of view, check out Thomas Schelling's Strategy of Conflict. No maths, just a great read from a Nobel prize winner.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/09/09/mutually-assur...
It's like a lot of things, you need to know enough to know why its useful, so its a bit of a catch-22. And then there's when you should apply it - a lot of the times just because you can doesn't mean you should.
are you asking "would an ordinary person encounter events in which game theory would be applicable on a normal, day-to-day basis?"
or are you asking "would an ordinary person who has studied game theory (but is not especially well versed or practiced) be capable of using it when it comes to making decisions?"
also can you please specify what you mean by an "ordinary person". how good are they at linear algebra and probability?
And assume they are good at maths.
Something you'd describe as being ordinary.
Though, I could be very wrong here, since it is definitely open for multiple interpretations.
