Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [262]
Since Prisoner 1 cannot reach Prisoner 2 to agree on a plan, he thinks through the possibilities. If he confesses and 2 does not, he (1) will get only six months, the best possible result for himself, and 2 will get twenty years, the worst outcome for him. But 1 recognizes that it is risky to take that chance; if he and 2 both own up, each will get eight years. Perhaps he’d be better off not confessing. If he doesn’t, and 2 also doesn’t, each gets one year, not a bad outcome. But suppose he doesn’t and 2 does— then 2 will get a mere six months and he a terrible twenty years.
Clearly, rational thinking cannot yield the best answer for either prisoner unless each trusts the other to do what is best for both. If one of them chooses on the basis of fear or of greed, both will lose. Yet it makes no sense to choose on the basis of what is best for both unless each is certain that the other will do likewise. And so the volunteers play, with any of a number of results, depending on the conditions and instructions laid down by the researcher. (Achieving what is best for both is only sometimes the outcome.)
The Prisoner’s Dilemma has been used, in various forms, by many researchers for five decades to study trust, cooperation, and the conditions that create them and their opposites.4
A college student rings the doorbells of a number of homes in Palo Alto, California, introduces himself as a representative of Citizens for Safe Driving, and makes a preposterous request: permission to place on the front lawn a billboard bearing the message drive carefully (preposterous because a photograph he produces shows a lovely house partly obscured by a huge, poorly lettered sign). Not surprisingly, most of the residents refuse. But some agree. Why do they? Because for them this was not the first request. Two weeks earlier, a different student, claiming to be a volunteer with the Community Committee for Traffic Safety, had asked them to display a neatly lettered three-inch-square sign reading be a safe driver, and they had agreed to this innocuous request. Of the residents who had not been softened up by the previous modest request, only 17 percent said yes to the billboard; of those who had previously agreed to display the three-inch sign, 55 percent did so.
The experiment, carried out in 1966, was the first of many to explore the foot-in-the-door technique, well known to fund raisers, of asking for a very small contribution and later returning to ask for a much larger one. The researchers, however, were not interested in raising funds or in safe driving but in the reasons that this method of persuasion works. They concluded that the people who agree to a first small request see themselves, in consequence, as helpful and civic-minded, and that this self-perception makes them more likely to help the next time, when the request is for something much larger. (The foot-in-the-door technique is still being used in experiments exploring the subtleties of motivation.)5
The staff of a large mental hospital says that Mr. X is schizophrenic. A well-dressed middle-aged man, he came in complaining of hearing voices; he told the admitting psychiatrist that they were unclear but that “as far as I can tell, they were saying ‘empty,’ ‘hollow,’ and ‘thud.’” Since being admitted, he has said nothing more about the voices and has behaved normally, but the staff continues to consider him mentally ill. The nurses even make note in his chart of one frequent abnormal activity: “Patient engages in writing behavior.” Several of his fellow inmates see him differently; as one of them says, “You’re not crazy. You’re