This article was downloaded by: [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill]

On: 28 October 2014, At: 07:18

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:
1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,
London W1T 3JH, UK

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Philosophy
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20

V. Is the prisoners dilemma

all of sociology?
Arthur L. Stinchcombe
a

University of Bergen ,

University of Arizona ,
Published online: 29 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Arthur L. Stinchcombe (1980) V. Is the prisoners dilemma all of
sociology?, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 23:2, 187-192, DOI:
10.1080/00201748008601901
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201748008601901

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all
the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our
platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors
make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,
completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of
the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be
independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and
Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,
demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever

or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in

relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 07:18 28 October 2014

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study
purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,
reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form
to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use
can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Symposium: Jon Elster's Logic and Society*

Inquiry, 23, 187-92

V. Is the Prisoners' Dilemma all of

Sociology?
Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 07:18 28 October 2014

Arthur L. Stinchcombe
University of Bergen and
University of Arizona
If social relations often require the choice of a cooperative solution to a prisoners'
dilemma, we must ask how people generally solve the games. Three possible devices are that those who choose non-cooperative strategies get a bad reputation and
so learn to be cooperative, that people are taught by parents that non-cooperators
have unhappy lives, or that an official can be paid a salary to make the cooperative
choice. By analyzing erotic love and marriage, and why people try to do their jobs,
it is suggested that these devices result in people often solving prisoners' dilemma
games without being conscious of them. How then do these structures that 'have
the function' of solving prisoners' dilemmas get created and maintain themselves?
It is suggested that Deweyan consciousness, existing only when structural strains or
unsolved games create personal problems, is adequate to explain many such functional structures.

Mark Twain, in an essay on James Fenimore Cooper, says that Cooper

has a few little devices he likes to make go, such as stepping on a twig.
When silence is worth three dollars a minute, a Cooper character has to
hunt up a twig to step on to alert all the Indians around. Twain proposes to
rename the Leatherstocking series the Broken Twig series. It would be a
malicious exaggeration to say that in Elster's book,* if people want to have
a social relation they have to hunt up a prisoners' dilemma to overcome.
But as in Cooper's case, the reader would recognize whom one was being
malicious about. So let me use this malicious paragraph to introduce a
short essay about what else there is to social structure besides prisoners'
dilemmas.
A good place to start is with erotic love, because ordinary people create
a great many marriages which, while they fail more often than they used
to, still fail less often than new businesses or new political parties. While
the reasons people marry, and even more amazing, stay married, have not
been sufficiently investigated, I will hazard the empirical guess that now* Jon Elster, Logic and Society: Contradictions and Possible Worlds, John Wiley & Sons,
Chichester/New York/Brisbane/Toronto 1978, viii + 235 pp., 10.95.

Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 07:18 28 October 2014

188 Arthur L. Stinchcombe

adays erotic love has a lot to do with it. To turn love into a prisoners'
dilemma, we have to urge that people will get more utility if they get their
own satisfaction without the costs of caring for the other, and therefore the
dominant outcome is that neither cares, both take cold showers and try to
forget it. We all know, and avoid, pedpfe who have the seducer's preference ordering. But clearly millions of people could not build durable
marriages if cold showers were the dominant outcome. (Perhaps, however, the divorce rate of sociologists indicates why the prisoners' dilemma
seems the very model of a modern social theory.)
There are several ordinary social processes that decrease the frequency
of erotic relations in which cold showers are the dominant outcome. A first
is that one gets a reputation as a seducer if one has the preference ordering
in which being cared for but not caring is the highest utility. As nearly as I
can estimate from casual observation, a reputation as a seducer, as available on a casual basis, does in fact increase seduction for both sexes. That
is, the normal factual outcome is not cold showers, but a series of boring
affairs in which neither one cares. But since marriages are generally made
in small social circles in which one has a reputation, whenever people start
caring for a seducer they are warned off by friends. This reputation-building process in the operative marriage market (i.e. in small social circles)
therefore produces a situation in which it is rational to care, if one wants to
be cared for.
A second important device is that parents believe that unless people
learn to love others, they will be unhappy, and in particular will have
unhappy marriages. Just as one's social circle makes immediate judgments about whether one has a winning strategy with a seducer, parents
make long-term judgments about whether seducers have happy lives.
While no doubt one should teach one's children a certain amount of irony,
a gentle cynicism that says life is not all troubadour love songs, most
people are observant enough to see that their acquaintances with the
highest level of moral idiocy are not the happiest. Besides, if you teach
your children to love, they may possibly love their parents, among others.
Because parents teach what they have learned, it is not too likely that
normally one comes into adolescence still having to learn that love is the
right approach to a fulfilling sexual life. Perhaps more people learn during
adolescence, for the first time, that being ruthlessly seduced has its advantages as well, that one does not have to stoke up a mood of lyric love
poetry every single time.
Both these devices however concede the main point, that somehow the

Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 07:18 28 October 2014

The Prisoners' Dilemma and Sociology

189

basic structure is really a prisoners' dilemma, and it is only the structures

which encourage the cooperative solution that really work. Both basically
argue that, external to the game itself, pressures are created to encourage
the socially optimal choice. But given that we come to the relevant part of
our life (or if we are unlucky, the relevant parts of our life) in social circles,
and having been raised by parents who want us to be happy, our experience of the erotic game itself normally teaches us to love rather than to
exploit. Since love is a big thing in our lives, we experiment with various
ways of playing it, fearfully and shyly or with exaggerated bravado at first,
then with more confidence. Our experience with this process makes it
easy for us to accept Erik Erikson's model of individual development in
which capacity to achieve intimacy comes after the solution to the problem of ego identity, i.e. normally after adolescence. We experiment with
shy and fearful ways of playing the erotic game, and they do not work. We
find eventually that love does work. That is, all that social structure, social
circles, and parental socialization, can do at best is to get us to try love,
against perhaps our rational better judgment as reflected in the prisoners'
dilemma quality of our adolescent rating and dating games. But on a
day-to-day basis, given Erikson's caveat of normal personality development up to adolescence, it turns out that love is really better.
The friends who warn against seducers and the parents who want their
children to be able to love so they can be happy are more reporting their
own experience of what makes them happy, than they are solving a
difficult dilemma whose dominant solution is a series of uncaring affairs.
Now let me turn to the opposite extreme from this uncomfortably
intimate field, and ask the question, 'Why do most people try to do their
jobs?' The answer Herbert Simon (as Chester Barnard before him) has
suggested is, 'Why not?' The basic argument in Simon's essay on a formal
theory of the employment relation is that if one has to work anyway, one
might as well do what the boss wants, if it is not too obnoxious. As long as
teaching and research (and drafting this paper in the middle of the night)
are within my zone of indifference, I might as well do them even if I have
tenure. It is indeed an important sociological principle that if all my
students competed directly with me for my job as soon as I had taught
them, teaching them to be better than I am would not be within my zone of
indifference. Much of Max Weber's work on bureaucracy can be read as
an essay on how to keep 'conflicts of interest' out of administrative
apparatuses, so that 'doing a good job' can be within the zone of indifference. But this suggests that one solution commonly used to prisoners'

Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 07:18 28 October 2014

190 Arthur L. Stinchcombe

dilemmas is to have a paid official choose a strategy, and to set up the
official's job so that his own fate does not depend on the payoff structure.
Once such a system with a disinterested judge is set up, one can base the
judge's social honor or promotion chances on choosing the cooperative
solution, and the dilemma is solved.
The individual level dilemma that remains, once we have used a disinterested third party to solve most dilemmas, is that each one is better off if
he or she gets a salary without working, but all are worse off in a society of
slackers. The same structural protections that work in the marriage market also help prevent the psychopathic solution here, that a reputation as a
slacker keeps one from getting jobs, and parents do not believe that lazy
children will have happier and more successful work lives. In addition, all
the complicated incentive wage systems, promotion by merit systems,
conflict of interest provisions, and the like, are set up so that the behavior
that is rational for the organization is both within the worker's zone of
indifference, and is the behavior within that zone that has the highest
utility for the worker. Organizations often fail to secure that Utopian state,
but they certainly go to great efforts so that the direct prisoners' dilemma
is rarely posed in daily life.
But given all these structural provisions, what is our introduction to
work life and work norms existentially like? It is that we start a new job
anxious to learn to do it well, we get disillusioned when it turns out that the
race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, and then, again with
some gentle cynicism perhaps, we try to do our jobs as best we can. An
administrator is generally wise if he or she spends most of the time
removing impediments and providing resources so that subordinates can
do a good job, and making sure that they are at least not punished for it. As
we go up the hierarchy, playing the game of work as if it were a prisoners'
dilemma gets more and more damaging to the organization, yet fixed
salaries and effective tenure in the job make it more and more possible to
conceal sloth. But if that actually happened, then the whole system for
keeping everyone at their jobs would break down. Professors are perhaps
the extreme case, for they could easily do nothing for high wages. Yet
there is always a new generation of trained professors, better trained in
fact than the last generation because in the meantime a great deal of good
research has been done and because that research has been responsibly
taught.
Not only is the prisoners' dilemma of work in an occupation solved
routinely on a large scale, and solved in a capitalist society in which

Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 07:18 28 October 2014

The Prisoners' Dilemma and Sociology

191

someone else gets the returns from extra effort; it is solved without ever
having been really faced in the daily experience of most of us.
The purpose of these two examples is to show that, even though love in
marriage and seriousness in work solve latent, unobservable, prisoners'
dilemmas, people do not consciously solve them. But as Elster himself has
argued, such functional explanations are incomplete, and he urges that
there is therefore no general reason to believe that the fact that love and
seriousness 'have the function' of solving the game means that the function accounts for them. Et tu quoque, Elster.
This is therefore a good place to go into the relation between latent,
unobserved structures of situations and existential experience or manifest
behavior, the nodal point of functional theory. I would argue that in almost
all Elster's examples, people who solve the prisoners' dilemma by having
a social relation do not consciously formulate the payoff structure. If then
Elster's examples are illuminating, they are illuminating for the same
reason that Malinowski's anxious Trobrianders setting out to sea protected by canoe magic are illuminating. Just as I am not really willing to
give up Malinowski for Elster, I am not willing to give up Elster the
scientist of prisoners' dilemmas for Elster the logician.
To start with, what is the sense in which people are unconscious of these
games? Clearly when one warns one's son about ruthless seductive women only after his body, one is realizing that the game of erotic love can be
played as if it had the prisoners' dilemma payoff structure. When one
advises one's children not to be lazy, one realizes that playing the game of
the labor market that way is a generally losing proposition. That is,
whenever people need to know the latent payoff structure, they figure it
out. In a psychologically similar way, when we need to instruct our
children in English grammar, we realize consciously that for example,
animate verbs like 'think' do not go with inanimate subjects like 'hill', even
if we would not perhaps be able to formulate the rule until we had read
Chomsky.
What we have, then, is a contingent conscious motivation that follows
John Dewey's rule, that one figures out solutions only when one has
problems. When the analyst points to the dilemma of always losing if
everyone plays as a seducer or as a lazy person, he or she is saying that the
structure of the situation is such that if people are not loving or serious,
they will have problems, and the problems will cause them to behave (if
they can) in such a way as to solve the game cooperatively. Malinowski's
Trobrianders were perfectly conscious that one loses people on the high

Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 07:18 28 October 2014

192 Arthur L. Stinchcombe

seas, but not on lagoons. If they set out to sea not properly protected by
magic, they had a contingent consciousness that they had a problem. Since
they could not solve it by building steamships, they did the best they could
with canoe magic. When white men came with steamships, they quickly
saw that this was a better solution than canoe magic, just as the seducer
often loses out in the long run to the kindly dull lover because the seduced
one realizes kindness is a better solution.
Contingent, Deweyan, pragmatist consciousness is exactly what is required to complete the functional causal loop. It says that whenever a
structure drifts away from its equilibrium, in such a way as to make lots of
people unhappy, they become conscious. They may only achieve what
Lenin called 'trade union consciousness', and not that consciousness
which could alter the structure toward one giving a permanent solution.
The Trobrianders do not necessarily get a rational solution, a steamship.
Seducers or lazy people are not wiped out once and for all by the devices of
reputation and socialization. Or to put it another way, nothing in the
argument makes the equilibrium well defined, as we are used to seeing in
economics. Several different structures ('functional alternatives') may be
'explained' by the same dilemma: trade unions or revolutionary parties,
cautious young women or decent young men, a sense of craftsmanship or
Taylorism, canoe magic or steamships. The reason is that since the reverse causal process set in motion by the tension is conscious and not
necessarily structurally constrained as in a market, it can have several
outcomes. The defining characteristic of an equilibrium in a functional
argument is that it does not create in individuals such problems as make
them conscious that some alternatives are better.
Further, since the mechanism by which structural tensions get translated into individual problems is not specified above (it is vague in Dewey,
too), whether such a functional causal loop will exist in any particular case
is problematic. Presumably the more important an area of life is to people,
the more likely they will become conscious of problems in that area, so sex
and work are good candidates for functional explanations. For a functional
explanation to be valid, as Elster has argued, one has to demonstrate that
there is indeed a reverse causal link, natural selection or Deweyan contingent consciousness or whatever. The a priori position in social science
should probably be Lenin's, that people who have problems due to structural strains are pretty clever, but not as clever as we, which is why a
function is often latent for them but as clear as a prisoners' dilemma to us.