Dan Hopkins linked to a podcast in which political scientist Robert Axelrod “takes us back to the trenches of World War I, to the winter of 1914, and an unlikely Christmas party along the Western Front.”
This is supposed (by Axelrod) to be an example of the prisoner’s dilemma, as discussed in his celebrated 1984 book, The Evolution of Cooperation.
Whenever I see this come up, I just want to scream in frustration.
For the reasons discussed in this article, I think Axelrod is wrong, and wrong in a revealing way, in his application of game theory to trench warfare. Political scientist Joanne Gowa also made this point in her review of Axelrod’s book in 1986.
Here’s the story:
The Evolution of Cooperation, by Axelrod (1984), is a highly influential study that identifies the benefits of cooperative strategies in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. We argue that the most extensive historical analysis in the book, a study of cooperative behavior in First World War trenches, is in error. Contrary to Axelrod’s claims, the soldiers in the Western Front were not generally in a prisoner’s dilemma (iterated or otherwise), and their cooperative behavior can be explained much more parsimoniously as immediately reducing their risks. We discuss the political implications of this misapplication of game theory.
In short: yes, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is important; yes, Axelrod’s book is fascinating; but no, the particular example he studied, of soldiers not shooting at each other in the Western Front in World War I, does not seem to be a Prisoner’s Dilemma. I have no special knowledge of World War I; I base my claims on the same secondary source that Axelrod used. Basically, it was safer for soldiers to “cooperate” (i.e., not shoot), and their commanders had to manipulate the situation to get them to shoot. Not at all the Prisoner’s Dilemma situation where shooting produced immediate gains.
In a way, this is merely a historical footnote; but it’s interesting to me because of the nature of the explanations, Axelrod’s eagerness to apply the inappropriate (as I see it) model to the situation, and others’ willingness to accept that explanation. I think the idea that cooperation can “evolve”–even in a wartime setting–is a happy story that people like to hear, even when it’s a poor description of the facts.
And here’s the story of how my article came to be written and then get published, over twenty years later.