Thedeti’s approach is a robust strategy.

Readership: All
Theme: Boundaries
Author’s Note: This post is based on an email exchange with Jack on 2023/12/27.
Length: 750 words
Reading Time: 4 minutes + ~25 minutes of video

Game Theory / The Prisoner’s Dilemma / Tit-for-Tat

In this post, we’ll explore The Law of Responsibility by taking a look at Game theory which ties into the topic of Boundaries quite closely.  The value of Game theory is that it takes into account the fact that we often don’t know the outcomes of our actions / decisions. Game theory can suggest optimal strategies and help determine where lines need to be drawn.

Jack reviewed Strategies for the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma a while back (2021/3/17). Fellow blogger Jim wrote a classic piece, Make women property again (2021/4/19), in which he describes the dynamics of intersexual Game strategies in terms of cooperation, defect, and equilibrium. There are more posts that touch on this topic below under Related.

This video looks at Game Theory, specifically the historical background of The Prisoner’s Dilemma and some of the most robust strategies that experts have found, namely, the Tit-for-Tat strategy (also described in Jack’s post above).  The video is a bit long at ~25 minutes, but well worth the watch at 1.5x or 2x speed.

Veritasium: What The Prisoner’s Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything (2023/12/24) Length: 27 minutes

The video describes how the Prisoner’s Dilemma applies to international politics during the Cold War.  Near the middle of the video, Dr. Axelrod’s program study on cooperation and defection is reviewed.  The findings are that the strategies of being cooperative are superior to those characterized by defection, with the following attributes making up the most successful strategies: Nice, Forgiving, Retaliatory, Clear.

  • Nice means to be cooperative rather than defective.
  • Forgiving means that the opponents defection is not ‘punished’ by another defection.
  • Retaliatory is responding to an opponents’ defection by defecting, but not more than once.
  • Clear means directly stating boundaries so they are easy to understand and so that the consequences for breaking them are also easy to understand.

Game Theory Applied to Marriage

I had not thought of Game Theory applying to marriage before I watched this video, but it does.  Once a man gets past the initial anger stage that comes with dropping BP notions, a man needs to identify the overall Game strategy that his wife employs, and adjust his own strategy such to maximize the longitudinal outcome so that the entire family wins.

The above analysis of The Prisoner’s Dilemma also gives us the most effective strategies for mutual success in marriage.

  • Nice is the same as being cooperative.
  • Forgiving means that bad behavior is not held over your spouse’s head for extended time periods.
  • Retaliatory is checking bad behavior and imposing consequences that match the poor behavior, while not punishing too much.
  • Clear means directly stating boundaries so they are easy to understand and so that consequences to breaking them are also easy to understand.

When considering Dr. Axelrod’s conclusions, it strikes me that Thedeti’s strategy matches these attributes.

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Self-Reflective Assessment

Ideally, marriage should be Nice and Forgiving, with mutual cooperation between spouses.  This is the ideal for building stable families and gives the best environment for building generational wealth.

But we all know that women do not play Nice, and neither do they respect men who play Nice, unfortunately.  This is perhaps the most profound challenge of achieving a sanctified marriage that Christian men have faced over the past few decades.

In the past (and even now), Chivalrous Churchian culture frowned on the Retaliatory and Clear aspects of the ideal Game strategy.  Men were expected to never defect (and were routinely chastised or punished if they did), and more or less allow the wife to determine all the boundaries and conditions of the relationship (similar to Briffault’s Law).  Considering the high rate of divorce and marital fraud in the church, we know where this strategy of perfect altruism leads.

The high rate of divorce and marital fraud is what Dr. Axelrod’s study would suggest when the woman sets the boundaries on the marriage. Women’s default position is often to defect, which is the most simplistic, solipsistic approach of getting as much as she can for herself, resulting in the outcome where both players get a minimal benefit that is much less than the benefits would be with a strategy of cooperation.

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At the other end of the spectrum is Thedeti’s strategy for preventing divorce, which essentially adds in the Retaliatory and Clear aspects of the ideal Tit-for-Tat Game strategy.  Women hate to be held accountable, and usually do not respond positively to verbal requests / warnings.  For unresponsive women who refuse to learn, the only way they can be held accountable is through punishment in the form of a Retaliation.  Also, by spelling out in no uncertain terms the mutually assured destruction that will result from divorce — which is comparable to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War — this is essentially making Clear the consequences of transgressing the boundaries. It is important to note here that the best strategy in the game is one of a party being overly forgiving while still maintaining a strategy of retaliation. This combination would seem to align well with both Thedeti’s story and mine as well.

Furthermore, adding in these two missing aspects of the Game also helps to nudge the relationship away from being purely transactional.  That is, the wife will be more likely to recognize and respect the husband’s missives as being beneficial for the entire family, more likely to view her own compliance as a mutually beneficial option, and less likely to see her husband as objectively replaceable.  IOW, it makes her recognize that she has skin in the game (and she does, whether or not she is inclined to face it).

If we were to think through the comparison further, I’m confident there would be other similarities.  

Related