Emotions -Part 1 - Tit-for-Tat
"You must force the enemy to move to your advantage.
Use your position.
The enemy must follow you."
Sun Tzu's The Art of War 5:4:16-18
Our decisions must factor in the reactions of others, not just their immediate response, but over multiple encounters. Our actions do not create our strategic positions directly. They are indirectly created by people’s emotional reactions to our moves over time. We can pretend we are logical creatures, but our logic is limited to a few key factors. We must always make decisions with limited information. Our emotions are our unconscious reactions to situations that are too complex to process logically.
When we seek to get what we want, we often get the opposite. The more we push, the harder they push back. This is known in psychology as reactance. It is part of how we are wired emotionally. Our emotions work along the lines of “ tit-for-tat,” as it is known in Game Theory. This is the strategy of initially cooperating. If the other party, however, tries to take advantage of our goodwill, we stop cooperating and start opposing.
In Game Theory, this is easily illustrated by iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where people can choose to make a small sacrifice for the best outcome for both rather than choose to seek a personal advantage, causing a loss for the other party and possibly for oneself. If we play the game only once, seeking an advantage works, but not if the game is run several times with the same people. In those situations, the other party will seek to punish the betrayer.
This tit-for-tat strategy is not only a part of human nature, but it is embedded in biology, where it is known as “reciprocal altruism.” This makes biology different than physics where every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. In human psychology, every action tends to create, not an opposite, but a similar reaction. And they are not necessarily equal. What we look for are actions that cost us little but create much greater rewards in return.
To use the reactions of others, we must first understand emotions. Emotions drive actions.
Basic Emotional Responses
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