The Survival Game
How Game Theory Explains the Biology of Cooperation and Competition
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From a zoologist and psychologist, an astonishing look at the biological and strategic roots of human decisions
Humans, like bacteria, woodchucks, chimpanzees, and other animals, compete or cooperate in order to get food, shelter, territory, and other resources to survive. But how do they decide whether to muscle out or team up with the competition?
In The Survival Game, David P. Barash synthesizes the newest ideas from psychology, economics, and biology to explore and explain the roots of human strategy. Drawing on game theory-the study of how individuals make decisions-he explores the give-and-take of spouses in determining an evening's plans, the behavior of investors in a market bubble, and the maneuvers of generals on a battlefield alongside the mating and fighting strategies of "less rational" animals. Ultimately, Barash's lively and clear examples shed light on what makes our decisions human, and what we can glean from game theory and the natural world as we negotiate and compete every day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Game theory attempts to explain the dynamics of life as a series of individual games, each involving specific moves that take place within a strictly delineated set of rules. Depending on whom you ask, it's either a brilliant tool for analyzing the complexities of social life or hopelessly reductionist. Zoologist and professor of psychology Barash (coauthor of The Myth of Monogamy), who emphatically falls into the former camp, proves an apt popularizer of the basics of the field, and his book reads like an introductory seminar led by a friendly professor with a slightly corny sense of humor. Readers who have never heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Game of Chicken will find Barash's explanations accessible, while those who are already familiar with the basics of game theory can appreciate the wealth of historical, biological and hypothetical cases to which he applies its methods, ranging from the Bush administration's foreign policy in the spring of 2003 to the behavior of sponge-dwelling isopods in the Gulf of California. Though persuasive, game theory as laid out here and in other works (the best known being Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene) can often seem harshly rational in its cold calculations of life and death, and Barash himself writes in his conclusion, "or a long time I have really loved game theory, and, for about as long, I've hated it." By the end of this highly readable introduction, readers will understand quite well what he means.
