Cooperation is generally something that is desired from people in the modern workplace, yet competition is an inherent characteristic of humans, so knowing when to compete and when to cooperate can be a crucial element of judgement to have.  New research from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Ploen believes it may have the answer.

The researchers designed a number of experiments that aimed to test the success rate of both cooperative and competitive strategies, with ‘extortion’ emerging as a peculiarly successful strategy.  This strategy involves a combination of cooperation and competition that is difficult to resist.

“Extortioners often come across as friendly colleagues. They reciprocate friendliness with friendliness, making their competitors feel as though it must be a misunderstanding, if they are taken advantage of again and again. They are forced to play along to avoid losing even more. This seemingly friendly yet extremely tough exploitation strategy is rewarded with additional gain,” the researchers explain.

Strategy for success

As is so often the case, the researchers used a prisoners’ dilemma style game to test strategies, as it is presents the ideal conflict between cooperation and competition.  Previous research has found that cooperation is the best strategy if you’re playing the same person repeatedly.  In reality however, it’s more likely that you’ll encounter people for the first time, or cooperate with them less frequently than is proposed in the prisoners’ dilemma.

In such a scenario, the extortion strategy comes into its own.  It involves a player forcing their opponent to constantly cooperate.  In 60% of the engagements, the player will cooperate also, but in 40% they will compete and therefore bag the maximum prize.  The difficulty for the opponent is that compliance is the only behavior that really pays off for them.  Indeed, the optimum strategy is to cooperate more and more frequently to gain from the 60% of instances whereby the player cooperates also, but this strategy means that the player obtains a greater prize as a result.

So can people be encouraged to cooperate instead?  The researchers tested this over 49 rounds of the game with players competing for real sums of money.  Money did appear to matter, as players liable to earn a bonus payment were more likely to cooperate, and did so much faster than those where no money was on the table.  In this scenario, the extortion strategy largely failed to emerge.

This flipped however if one of the players was also enticed with a possible bonus.  In this scenario the extortion strategy would rapidly emerge, despite attempts by the other player to discipline them and encourage cooperation.

“Willingness to cooperate is not a recipe for success, if competitive pressure is strong. Our results show why human beings frequently prove to be less cooperative in real life, than has been predicted in the past,” the authors explain.