Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [62]
“Shy, ugly man, fond of extended periods of self-pity, middle-aged, flatulent, and overweight, seeks the impossible.”
“Blah, blah, whatever. Indifferent woman. Go ahead and write.”
“Unashamed triumphalist male for the past forty-six years. Will I bore you? Probably. Do I care? Probably not.”
Not only hilarious, they illustrate Zahavi’s concept of the high-cost signal from the chapter on evolution. Only people with charm and looks and talent to burn (as well as excellent senses of humor) can afford to be so self-deprecating about themselves—which is a useful lesson for the rest of us: the soft sell is more effective than the hard sell.
For those interested in cleaning up the game of love, one simple change can help eliminate a great deal of bad behavior: increase the length of the game. That’s what a political scientist did when he invited experts in game theory to submit computer programs to play against one another in a game known as the prisoner’s dilemma. Several dozen programs were submitted, and they “played” for hundreds of rounds. The winner? The shortest program submitted—a mere five lines—which its creator dubbed “Tit for Tat.” The program did exactly what you would expect. In its initial encounter with any program, it would cooperate. In all future encounters, it would do what the other program had done in the previous encounter. If the other program cooperated, it would cooperate. If the other program acted selfishly, “Tit for Tat” would behave selfishly. This simple idea of rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior bested every other program. To create a similar situation in the dating world, though, you would need to have the same two people “play” (i.e., date) each other multiple times. Under these conditions, people would quickly clean up their behavior because deception and other bad behavior would simply be punished in the next round.
Unfortunately, dating is not like that. The partners in any game are constantly shifting. But you could still achieve similar results if you had good enough communication. When people can communicate the past behavior of others, they can form networks of trust and shut out players who rely on deception. Imagine if each of us was given a rating based on our dating histories, similar to the buyer and seller ratings on eBay. If someone behaved badly, he or she would find it increasingly difficult to find anyone to date. When people lived in one place for most of their lives, gossip essentially served this function and helped impose a standard of behavior, and some Internet sites are now starting to adopt this concept, although it is far from foolproof since users can simply move to a new site. If one dating Web site ever dominates the way that eBay does with online auctions, it will have the power to improve the behavior (or at least the honesty) of men and women when they date—more so than anything since Moses came down with the Ten Commandments.
THE DOWRY GAME
While all this game theory may be interesting, some of you are probably wondering right about now, so what? Is there some more practical advice that game theory can offer? Well, yes, actually there is. For example, it can finally provide an answer to that age-old question: how many people do you have to date before you meet your true love? The answer: twelve. That’s right. A nice, round dozen. Not too difficult, right? Okay, yes, I realize you are going to need more convincing than that. Many of you have dated far more than twelve people and are still no closer to finding a partner than you were when you were the age of twelve. Others are probably outraged that I would even put a definitive number on such