Chicken

Extract from "Prisoner's Dilemma", Wikipedia

Learning psychology and game theory

Where game players can learn to estimate the likelihood of other players defecting, their own behavior is influenced by their experience of the others' behavior. Simple statistics show that inexperienced players are more likely to have had, overall, atypically good or bad interactions with other players. If they act on the basis of these experiences (by defecting or cooperating more than they would otherwise) they are likely to suffer in future transactions. As more experience is accrued a truer impression of the likelihood of defection is gained and game playing becomes more successful. The early transactions experienced by immature players are likely to have a greater effect on their future playing than would such transactions affect mature players. This principle goes part way towards explaining why the formative experiences of young people are so influential and why they are particularly vulnerable to bullying, sometimes ending up as bullies themselves.

The likelihood of defection in a population may be reduced by the experience of cooperation in earlier games allowing trust to build up[6]. Hence self-sacrificing behavior may, in some instances, strengthen the moral fibre of a group. If the group is small the positive behavior is more likely to feedback in a mutually affirming way encouraging individuals within that group to continue to cooperate. This is allied to the twin dilemma of encouraging those people whom one would aid to indulge in behavior that might put them at risk. Such processes are major concerns within the study of reciprocal altruism, group selection, kin selection and moral philosophy.

I was reading about the a certain type of mathematics known as Game Theory, which started from reading a wikipedia article about the "Political status of Taiwan". This led me to reading about "Brinkmanship", which then led to "Chicken (game)", which led on to the article on the Prisoner's Dilemma. I'm sure you have all know about the game of chicken, if not the mathematics of it, and probably the prisoner's dilemma too in one form or another. They are rather famous. I just found the above paragraph an interesting example of the way the psychology and mathematics involved in an extremely simple game such as this can be used to explain real-world human development. It's an interesting study in why people develop selfish or selfless qualities, and kind of boils most of the worlds problems down to something very simple.