Theorists have posited that pure tit-for-tat strategies in iterative prisoners dilemma games were invulnerable. Is this correct? The authors seek to answer this question by examining the ability of various prisoners dilemma gaming strategies to withstand invasion by other competing strategies.

Bender and Swistak examine a gaming strategy universe that includes the strategies:

• Tit for tat - a player will initially cooperate and then in future rounds mimic the behavior of their opponent.
• Tit for 2 Tats - a player will cooperate for the first two rounds and then defect in rounds where their opponent defected in the previous two.
• Suspicious Tit for Tat - a player will initially defect and then will mimic their opponent in future rounds.
• Always Defect
• Always Cooperate
• Grim Trigger - Begin by cooperating, if opponent defects then always defect afterward.

These strategies were examined in pure conditions where only one existed, and then competing strategies were introduced. If a given strategy could withstand incursions by competing strategies it was deemed "stable".

Stability proved to be a continuum. All strategies proved to have points of equilibrium. At this point, a strategy can withstand its maximum level of incursion. That point is that strategy's maximum stability.

Chapter 1, The Problem of Cooperation. Why do people (or other actors) cooperate? "The objective of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge." It uses the Prisoner's Dilemma as a framework for testing theories about balancing self-interest and competition.

"In the Prisoners' Dilemma, the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using and, in particular, on whether this strategy leaves room for the development of mutual cooperation."

Chapter 2, TIT FOR TAT. "The iterated Prisoners' Dilemma has become the E. Coli of social psychology," yet people have not paid much attention to how to play the game well. Axelrod organized a computer tournament to which people familiar with PD submitted programs encoding different strategies. The winner was one of the simplest, TIT FOR TAT.

Axelrod then constructed an environment in which different programs competed, and the losing programs were eliminated: this was an ecology that rewarded high scoring programs, and punished others. "This process simulates survival of the fittest. A rule that is successful on average with the current distribution of rules in the population will become an even larger proportion of the environment of the other rules in the next generation. At first, a rule that is successful with all sorts of rules will proliferate, but later as the unsuccessful rules disappear, success requires good performance with other successful rules." In other words, the competition gets tougher.

"The analysis of the tournament results indicate that there is a lot to be learned about coping in an environment of mutual power. Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematics made the systematic errors of being too competitive for their own good, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other side."

The tournaments reveal that "there is a single property which distinguishes the relatively high-scoring entries from the relatively low-scoring entries. This is the property of being nice, which is to say never being the first to defect."

TIT FOR TAT's rules for success:

• Be nice. Don't be the first to go on the attack. This demonstrates good will, and avoids provoking others.
• Retaliate. If others attack, retaliate. Not doing so encourages bad behavior and gives niceness a bad reputation.
• Be forgiving. If others defect but then go back to cooperating, accept the opportunity to move back to a cooperative mode.
• Be clear. Others can predict what you'll do, be certain that their moves will have definite outcomes. "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 4, Trench Warfare. During World War I, "live and let live" arrangements emerged spontaneously between opposing units on the Western Front. Cooperation could take hold because "the same small units faced each other in immobile sectors for extended periods of time." Consequently, they had a more sustained relationship than in mobile warfare, and could develop commonly-understood rules, reciprocity and restraint in attacks, displays of strength (e.g., snipers shooting at hard targets)as well as ethics (recognition that there was an arrangement and violating it was immoral) and rituals (e.g., regular artillery firing).

"Cooperation first emerged spontaneously in a variety of contexts, such as restraint in attacking the distribution of enemy rations, a pause during the first Christmas in the trenches, and a slow resumption of fighting after bad weather made sustained combat almost impossible. These restraints quickly evolved into clear patterns of mutually understood behavior, such as two-for-one or three-for-one retaliation for actions that were taken to be unacceptable."

Chapter 6, How to Choose Effectively. Four suggestions about how to do well in PD:

• Don't be envious. In a PD, "envy is self-destructive. Asking how well you are doing compared to how well the other player is doing is not a good standard unless your goal is to destroy the other player." However, in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, you can't do better than the other player, unless they're always suckers. "In a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself. The other's success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself."
• Don't be the first to defect (be nice). "It pays to cooperate as long as the other player is cooperating." In a short game, defection can make sense; but in a relationship, taking advantage of the other person is self-defeating.
• Reciprocate both cooperation and defection. TIT FOR TAT "does not destroy the basis of its own success. On the contrary, it thrives on interactions with other successful rules." However, the right level of forgiveness depends on the context, and the other players' strategies.
• Don't be too clever. "In a zero-sum game, such as chess it pays for us to be as sophisticated and as complex in our analysis as we can. Non-zero-sum games are not like this. The other player can respond to your own choices. And unlike the chess opponent, the other player in a PD should not be regarded as someone who is out to defeat you." "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 7, How to Promote Cooperation. Promoting cooperation can be thought of as an exercise in tinkering with the variables in a PD. "As long as the interaction is not iterated, cooperation is very difficult. That is why an important way to promote cooperation is to arrange that the same two individuals will meet each other again, be able to recognize each other from the past, and to recall how the other has behaved until now."

• Enlarge the shadow of the future. For cooperation to emerge, players must be in a continuing relationship, with the expectation that it will continue in the future. "Mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the past." "There are two basic ways of doing this: by making the interactions more durable, and by making them more frequent. [P]rolonged interaction allows patterns of cooperation which are based on reciprocity to be worth trying and allows them to become established," Making interactions more frequent makes "the next interaction occur sooner, and hence the next move looms larger than it otherwise would." You might do this by enforcing isolation, or constructing hierarchies or organizations, which are "especially effective at concentrating the interactions between specific individuals."
• Change the payoffs. Make defection less attractive, by enforcing laws, or growing the value of long-term incentives.
• Teach people to care about each other.
• Teach reciprocity. Reciprocity "actually helps not only oneself, but others as well. It helps others by making it hard for exploitative strategies to survive."
• Improve recognition abilities. "The ability to recognize the other player from past interactions, and to remember the relevant features of those interactions, is necessary to sustain cooperation. Without these abilities, a player could not use any form of reciprocity and hence could not encourage the other to cooperate."

Chapter 8, The Social Structure of Cooperation.
The social structure of cooperation involves labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality.

• Labels are fixed characteristics of an agent that are observable by other agents. Labels affect reciprocity and retaliation via assumptions of group similarity and stereotypes.
• Reputation is others' belief about the strategies an agent will employ. Reputation may be based on past behavior or on rumours, i.e. reputation can be accurate or merely believed. Reputation affects whether or not other agents will cooperate or defect with you.
• Regulation involves setting the stringency of a standard of behavior "high enough to get most of the social benefits of regulation, and not so high as to prevent the evolution of a stable pattern of voluntary compliance from almost all of the companies" (or regulated agents).
• Territoriality refers to both physical and conceptual spaces that can be 'invaded' by agents of differing strategies. Territoriality establishes boundaries within which behaviors will be reinforced or retaliated against depending on prevailing norms. Also, the boundary provides an 'inside' for agents that comply with the norms, and an 'outside' to which they can be expelled if they do not comply.

Chapter 9, The Robustness of Reciprocity.

• Cooperation can get started by even a small cluster of individuals who are willing to reciprocate cooperation, even in a world where no one else will cooperate.
• Once cooperation is establish, it protects itself from invasion by non-cooperative strategies.
• The foundation of cooperation is the durability of the relationship, which allows agents to learn about each other in order to cooperate.

“The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. The first part of this review is a discussion of categories of social dilemmas and how they are modeled.” The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the problem of providing public goods, and Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons are three powerful metaphors that facilitated and structured research but also served as blinders since their limitations are often not recognized.

Models:

Kollock’s analysis divides dilemmas into two-person and N-person dilemmas. The key two-person dilemmas are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Assurance Game, and the Chicken Game. Each of these models is defined by the ordering of four possible outcomes: mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and either first or second person’s unilateral defection. Each of these outcomes generates an individual benefit for each person and is ordered by the benefit for the first person.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma models unsecured transactions, e.g. buying and selling over the Internet. The best outcome of a Prisoner’s Dilemma is unilateral defection of the first person, followed by mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and the worst outcome is the first person’s unilateral cooperation. Since defection has the highest potential benefit and cooperation the highest potential risk, the equilibrium of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is mutual defection. This equilibrium is deficient because the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.

The Assurance Game is similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma except it models situations where mutual cooperation is more benefical for each player than unilateral defection, e.g. a project that requires collaboration. This extra motivation to mutually cooperate creates two equilibria, one optimal, which is mutual cooperation, and one deficient, which is mutual defection. The optimal equilibrium requires trust between the two persons sufficient to assure each other that the other will cooperate. Insufficient trust leads to the deficient equilibrium.

The Chicken Game is again similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma except mutual defection is the worst outcome, worse than unilateral cooperation. This replaces the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s mutual defection equilibrium by two equilibria, unilateral defection and unilateral cooperation because of the strong motivation to not mutually defect. The Chicken Game is a model for situations that require volunteer effort to avoid the worst outcome but where duplicate effort is less desirable.

Kollock divides N-person dilemmas into two types based on cost and benefit for each individual. The first type is known as the social fence,s where an individual is presented with an immediate cost that generates a benefit shared by all. The individual wants to avoid the cost but if all do, everyone is worse off. A common metaphor of the social fence is the provisioning of public goods, which are (to a varying degree) non-excludable and nonrival. The key characteristic of a public good dilemma is the production function which defines the relationship between the level of resources contributed and the level of public good provided. Production functions are classified into decelarating, linear, accelerating, and step functions. Various production functions can produce N-person versions of any of the 2-person dilemmas.

The second type is know as social trap where the “individual is tempted by an immediate benefit that produces a cost to all. If all succumb to the temptation, the outcome is a collective disaster.” The usual metaphor of the social trap is the tragedy of the commons. A key feature of commons dilemmas is that the benefits are non-excludable (or difficult to make excludable) and subtractable. The key characteristic of commons dilemmas is the carrying capacity of the commons which depends on the replenishment rate of the subtractable joint resource.

Important (but not inevitable) features that affect N-person dilemma dynamics and contrast them to two-person dilemmas are anonymity, diffusion of defection cost, and little or no direct control on others. Some of these features are also found in two-person dilemmas, e.g. blaming defection on out-of-control circumstances is a form of anonymity in two-person games.

Solutions:

“The second part of [Kollock’s paper] is an extended treatment of possible solutions for social dilemmas. These solutions are organized into three broad categories based on whether the solutions assume egoistic actors and whether the structure of the situation can be changed: Motivational solutions assume actors are not completely egoistic and so give some weight to the outcomes of their partners. Strategic solutions assume egoistic actors, and neither of these categories of solutions involve changing the fundamental structure of the situation. Solutions that do involve changing the rules of the game are [called] structural solutions.”

The motivation of not completely egoistic actors to cooperate is influenced by social value orientation, communication, and group identity. The social value orientation of a person seems to be acquired from the person’s social environment and is some linear combination of a cooperator who tries to maximize joint outcome, a competitor who tries to maximize own outcome relative to partner, and an individualist who tries to maximize own outcome. Kollock does not find any conclusive results in how to influence social value orientation but does find evidence that it varies between different countries.

The presence of communication positively affects cooperation rates. Communication enables a person to find out about others’ choices, to make explicit commitments, to appeal to what is the moral thing to do, and most importantly, to create or reinforce a sense of group identity. The effect of group identity is in fact so strong that it can affect cooperation rates even in the absence of communication. In-group behavior of individuals frequently includes personal restraint and treating Prisoner’s Dilemma situations as Assurance Games. However, in-group behavior implies out-group behavior with the potential to cause severe social costs due to intergroup conflicts.

“[Strategic solutions] rely on the ability of [egoistic] actors to shape to shape the outcomes and hence behavior of other actors. For this reason, many of these strategic solutions are limited to repeated two-person dilemmas.” Axelrod (see The Evolution of Cooperation) identifies three requirements for strategic solutions: ongoing relationships between actors (i.e. all expect shared dilemmas in their future), ability to identify each other, and ability to keep track of the other’s past behavior.

The most successful strategy in iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments (everyone against everyone) that meet these requirements is Tit-for-Tat which starts out with cooperation and then matches the partner’s previous behavior. This strategy transforms a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma into a repeated Assurance Game since the only long-term outcome of this strategy is either mutual cooperation or mutual defection (the two equilibria of the Assurance Game). Key aspects of successful strategies in repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments are (1) to realize that it is not a zero-sum game hence does not benefit from a competitive social orientation (“don’t be envious”), (2) to not defect first, (3) to reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and (4) to be predictable so that the partner clearly understands one's strategy. One important caveat is that repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments assume perfect communication. In real life where communication is often imperfect more generous or forgiving strategies can avoid accidental cycles of recrimination.

Recent evidence suggests that the strategy of choosing partners is more important than the strategy used within a dilemma. In a modified version of iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament actors can exit current relationships and choose alternative partners. A very successful strategy in this environment is Out-for-Tat which exits a relationship as soon as the partner defects. A more forgiving version that gives a defecting partner a second chance is even more successful.

Strategies for N-person dilemmas involve grim triggers, social learning, and group reciprocity. In a “grim trigger” strategy an individual only cooperates if all other group members cooperate and defects as soon as one other group member defects. Social learning is the basis of a cognitively less taxing class of strategies that involves imitating other group members and look for thresholds in public good provisioning instead of calculating marginal rates of return or figuring out dominating strategies. Group identity increases cooperation rates because group members follow strategies that assume that all members share a strong expectation of group reciprocity (reciprocity within the group).

Structural solutions change the rules of the dilemma thereby changing or eliminating it. One approach is to reinforce prerequisites for strategic solutions by introducing long-term accountability (shadow of the future) that influences individual reputations. However, accountability and reputation are not sufficient to escape the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s equilibrium of mutual defection (in two- or N-person version) if the means to encourage cooperation are too weak (e.g. production function for public good too flat or too much effort required to reach provisioning point).

Many people seem to positively weigh others’ outcomes since cooperation increases significantly as the benefits to others from one’s cooperation increase. Cooperation levels are also higher if group members are asked to contribute to a non-divisible public good that only benefits the whole group, probably due to an increased sense of group identity (see group reciprocity).

Cooperation in N-person dilemmas increases if individual contributions have (or are perceived to have) a discernable effect, i.e. make an efficacious contribution. For public goods with step-level production function one can create a minimal subgroup that requires every member to contribute in order to reach the provisioning point or let two groups compete for contributions, turning an N-person Prisoner’s Dilemma into an N-person Chicken Game. Another example are "matching grants" or "adopting" an individual from a large group of benefactors.

Increasing group size makes defection more anonymous and increases the cost of organizing. However, research results on cooperation depending on group size alone are inconclusive. In the case of highly non-rival goods with a threshold production function a larger group is more likely to contain a "critical mass" of cooperating individuals. Diversity of group members' interests and resources encourages formation of critical mass.

A common structural strategy for N-person dilemmas is the creation of boundaries in an attempt to make public goods or commons more excludable. There are three main approaches: The first one is to institute an external authority or trusted leader to govern access to commons. This approach appears to be less preferable if other structural changes are possible. Establishing an external authority can raise severe problems of justice, enforcement, corruption, and scalability. The second approach is to break up commons into private parcels assuming that individuals will take better care of own property than common property. However, privatization does not work for non-divisible goods, raises the social question of who gets to own commons, does not prevent owners to routinely destroy their own property (“tragedy of enclosure”), and requires institutional support to enforce private property rights. A third approach is to locally regulate “access to and use of common property by those who actually use and have local knowledge of the resource.” One key characteristic of successful and long-lasting local regulations is clearly defined boundaries.

Sanctions are a structural method to encourage cooperation where the outcomes themselves of N-person dilemmas are too weak of a motivator. However, the implementation of sanctions can be very expensive. Local monitoring and sanctioning systems are more practical and less costly. Another way to reduce cost is to use a graduated system of sanctions with low-cost conflict resolution. A sanctioning system is itself a public good and therefore poses a second-order dilemma. Communities with a high level of trust readily cooperate in a first-order dilemma but cooperate less in a second-order dilemma hence are less willing to support a sanctioning system. The opposite is true for communities with a high level of distrust.

Recent years have seen a series of questions asking the applicability and usefulness of traditional collective action theory to certain contemporary phenomena. To name an example, Olson's (1965) proposition that small groups are more successful than larger ones in his account of collective action theory can now be widely contested with evidence from contemporary networks such as the highly successful Indymedia (a large network of journalists, writers, and everyday people organised around participatory media principles).

The paper first examines traditional collective action theory in relation to two central elements: the problem of free-riding and the importance of formal organisation as one important way to overcome it. The challenges presented by new uses of information and communication technologies address specifically to these fundamental elements.

A number of examples are presented, to drive the point that collective action theory has evolved or departed from its traditional concept especially with respect to free-riding (do I contribute or free-ride) and the role of, and dependence on organisation. Some examples are:

1. “Battle in Seattle”, in which a far-flung network of groups «used e-mail, the Web, and chat rooms to engage in a largely self-organising protest against the policies of the World Trade Organisation» (pp 370).
2. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBLM): «a core strength of the campaign, which still seems to be ill understood by many, has always been its loose structure» (pp. 370).
3. «participating in various groups and public forums in which people's useful contributions emerge from an interactive process rather than the explicit pursuit of a goal» (pp 371).
4. «posting information on a web page or weblog, contributing to discussion on an electronic bulletin board» (pp 372).
5. Open source projects (pp 375).
6. Spontaneously organised smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002) aimed at public goods (pp 376).

These examples effectively illustrate how the nature of free-riding, organisations, and organising have changed in the contemporary media environment. In the case of the problem of free-riding, the binary decision of whether one contributes or free-ride is no longer apparent. Instead, the individual frequently go back and forth through a process of interaction and negotiation for collective action. In many of these scenarios, decisions to free-ride or contribute can also no longer be easily discerned.

The rise of new technological and participatory media have also made communication methods that used to be exclusive to formal organisations, now available for individuals. Changing structures of organisation that are made possible by communication technologies have also resulted in the ability of social movements and groups to take on certain functions of formal organisations — even surpassing the possibilities of formal organisations. Again, the boundaries are blurred, «between traditional hierarchical forms and flexible network structures».

By studying these phenomena, collective action theory is now reframed using the principle of boundary-crossing between private and public. In this context, when an individual cross a boundary between private and public realms, and when this boundary is crossed by two or more people in conjunction with a public good, collective action is said to have occurred. This is a rich frame by which several scenarios in the current contemporary media environment can be accommodated:

• the ease of transforming private discourse to public discourse, without any specific dependence on central organisation (e.g. private responses to an e-mail discussion which eventually becomes public)
• The absence of a central organisation prompting people to share their email lists (transforming private domains into a public domain of collective action)
• The Web as a vehicle for crossing boundaries (information that are privately created may one day become useful publicly)

The facilitation of private-public boundaries results in exchanges that could arguably advance collective action. Technologies that help to identify, for example, private interests, experiences, and acquaintance once identified as shared between people can prompt collective action. Other than permitting the constitution of pubic spheres around commons interests, this focus would also accommodate the continuum by which individuals and groups can easily move back and forth between private and public realms.

Further thoughts:

The notion of using the private-public boundary crossing as the principle to explain contemporary types of collective action is a very interesting one, especially in relation to the commons paradigm in the media environment. Such reconceptualization of collective action is also necessary, in light of the various types of convergence that the world is witnessing today. The convergence of technologies and growing interdependence between people and their uses of technologies, converging communities and organisations, and convergence in media as they continuously evolve over time.

Having said this, there is also a number of theories and constructs which I think would be very useful to study along with the work raised by this paper. For example, borrowing the lens of structuration theory (Giddens, 1986) to look at how the nature of technologies in use reflect the structural and agency properties of the private and public realms would enhance understandings around the social processes of these technologies (how technologies influence and are influenced by people). The theoretical constructs of the commons, such as the Prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy as conceived by Hardin (1968) would also be relevant to study with respect to the free-riding problem and the role of organisations raised by traditional collective action theory. And along with this paper, it may also be worthwhile to reframe the commons concept in light of the contemporary scenarios of the commons.

References

Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J. and Stohl, C. (2005) Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment. Communication Theory, 15 (4), 365-388.

Giddens, A. (1986) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 62, 1243-1248

Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart mobs: the next social revolution, Perseus Books Group, Cambridge.

There are basic facts related to decision making and the idea of "free choice" that everybody should know. Experiments have proven that we are victims of ourselves, and therefore we can fall victims of others. This book presents the mechanisms that guide our behaviors and the techniques that can help influence it, so that the reader can be aware of the traps that awaits him in his day-to-day life.

How the brain works - resilience of decisions

Our choices are influenced by prior decisions, whether they were conscious or unconscious decisions. And these individual behaviors impact group decisions as well, and points to the fact that in a group, the analysis of the impact of a decision should always be done by people other than the ones involved in the decision.

Examples of such self manipulation can be seen in 3 types of behaviors:

• Escalating Commitment
• Sunk Cost
• Escalating Conflict

Escalating Commitment

When people agree to a small request, they feel committed, and will make sure that they do the right thing even if it costs them more than they originally expected or intended. For example if someone is asked to look after a bag, chances are that he/she will run after a robber trying to get away with this bag. Under the same circumstances but without a prior request from the owner of the bag, the same person may not have done it. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Staw published in 1976 "knee deep in the big muddy: a study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action".

Sunk cost

When people make a choice, they tend to choose based on what did cost them more instead of what would be the best for them. For example if people make a reservation (and pay) for two events that turn out to be on the same day, they will tend to choose to go to the one that did cost more rather than the one they would most interested in, even though the money was spent and the overall cost is the same regardless of the choice made. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Arkes and Blumer published in 1985 "the psychology of sunk cost"

Escalating Conflict

When a person has to take a additional decision to get out of a situation in which he is trapped, it is very hard to make such decision. If the opportunity to re-evaluate the original choice is not given, people will tend to stick to their original choice way beyond the point when this choice starts costing them more than they would ever have committed. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Brockner, Shaw, and Rubin published in 1979 "factors affecting withdrawals from an escalating conflict: quitting before it's too late"

How manipulation works: from Self-manipulation to Manipulation

Preparatory steps

All the behaviors presented earlier are the result of self manipulation, but they open the door for actual manipulation by others. Somebody can easily exploits these type of behaviors, and introduce preliminary steps in an interaction so as to condition a person to fall later into one of the response mechanism described earlier. The initial preparatory decision should be the result of free choice, which can be induced:

• through a plain lie, for example offering a product that is not available or promising a deal that does not exist
• by controlling how the information is released, for example ask the subject to make a decision first, then provide him with more details that include changes to the original deal (low ball technique)
• by using a teaser, for example offering a sale on a pair of shoes with only large sizes left

It has been shown that in addition to decision being resilient, people also tend to stick to this original decision even after they have been informed of a change to the original deal. An example of this mechanism can be found in a study by Cialdini published in 1978 "low ball procedure for producing complaince: commitment then cost"

Engagement

What makes all these processes work is the effect of "engagement", which precedes the "resilience of decision", as demonstrated in a study by Kiesler published in 1971 "The psychology of commitment - Experiments linking behavior to belief"

Engagement can be reinforced, and there can be several levels of engagement:

• signing a petition is a low entry level, and providing name/address/profession is another level
• how public is the engagement or how often the engagement is requested also impacts the level of engagement.

As a result of this engagement process the reality is that "free choice" is actually "free will submission". The perception from the decision maker is that he is making a free choice, but the reality is that he can be influenced by a simple request.

The consequences of engagement

It has been shown that the preparatory steps work better when engagement is reinforced by action. More specifically, experimentation has shown the following:

• When there is engagement into an action that is in tune with what the person thinks, it reinforces the conviction of this person.
• When there is engagement into an action that conflicts with what the person thinks, it results in an adaptation of the convictions

Engagement into a non-conflictual decision, followed by an action makes the choice more resilient. This can go as far as creating boomerang reactions to opinions that go against the original choice. For example it has been shown that people asked to sign a petition for a cause that they are supporting will become stronger supporters of that cause after they have signed than they were before.

The interesting part is that the effect of engagement being reinforced by actions applies someone regardless of the original point of view of the person. This can regarded as a good thing or as a bad thing depending on how one wants to look at it:

• when engagement is for a good cause, it is usually considered to be leadership - the person engages in an action
• when engagement is for a "bad" cause, it is usually called being brain washed, or manipulated - the person has been engaged into an action

But the mechanism behind remains the same.

Techniques of manipulation

Several techniques can help prepare the context for a better compliance to a later request:

• The "Foot-in-the-door" technique
• The "Door-in-the-face" technique
• Touch
• The "Foot-in-the-mouth" technique
• The "Fear-then-relief" technique
• The "But you are free of" technique
• The "A little is better than nothing" technique

The "Foot-in-the-door" technique

In this technique, the preparatory step consist in getting the person engaged into a low cost action as a way to prepare for a much more costly one. For example asking for the time of the day before asking for some money to pay for a phone call - such examples can be found in a study by Freedman and Frazer published in 1966 "compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique", and by Pliner Host Kohl and Saari published in 1974 "compliance without pressure: some further data on the foot-in-the-door technique".

This technique works even better if you follow up with an "attribution", by commenting on the person's action and by making them feel good about such action (Attribution technique - see below)

The "Door-in-the-face" technique

This technique consist in asking for something totally unrealistic as a way prepare for a much more resonable request. For example asking for a large sum beyond the means of a person before asking for $100. Such examples can be found in studies by Cialdini, Vincent, Lewis, Catalan, Wheeler and Darby published in 1975 "a reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing complaince: the door-in-the-face technique"

Touch

This technique consist in touching the person for a few second as a preparatory step for a later request. As strange as it may seem it does make real difference. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Kleinke published in 1973 "compliance to requests made by gazing and touching experimentaters in field settings"

The "Foot-in-the-mouth" technique

This technique consist in inquiring about the person and showing interest in the answer as a preparatory step for a later request. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Howard published in 1990 "the influence of verbal responses to common greetings on compliance behavior: the foot-in-the-mouth effect"

The "Fear-then-relief" technique

This technique consist in creating stress before providing relief as a preparatory step for a later request. However unpopular it might be, examples of this technique can be found in police questioning procedures.

The Attribution technique

This technique consist in commenting on the person's action to give them a good image of themselves. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Millet, Brickman and Bolen published in 1975 "attribution versus persuasion as a means for modifying behavior"

The "But you are free of" technique

This technique consist in clarifying after a request that the person should feel free to not comply to this request. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Guegen and Pascual published in 2002 "evocation of freedom and compliance: the but ou are free of... technique".
This technique also works on the web (for example by changing the wording of a button to "feel free to click here" instead of just "click here"). In one experiment from Guegen, LeGouvello, Pascual and Morineau published in 2002 "request solicitation and semantic evocation of freedom: an evaluation in a computer mediated communication context", it was shown to move the success rate from 65% to 82%.

The "A little is better than nothing" technique

This technique consist in adding to the request that a little will be better than nothing, thus removing the excuse of cost from the possible answers. Example of results from such a technique can be found in a study from Cialdini and Shroeder published in 1976 "increasing compliance by legitimazing paltry contributions"

"This is not all" technique

This technique consist in offering additional items that were not requested originally to justify the high cost of the request. This is a classic, and we are exposed to in our everyday shopping.

The "Foot-in-the-memory" technique

This technique consist in asking the person to remember when they did not comply in the past with something that they approve of in general, or try to ask them to visualise situations that would not be conform with a given policy. An example of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Dickerson, Thibodeau, Aronson and Miller published in 1992 "using cognitive dissonance to encourage water conservation"

Once all these techniques have been identified, it is then possible to mix and match to try to optimise results. An example of such mix and match and the results that it yielded can be found in a study by Joule published in 1989 "Tobacco deprivation: the foot in the door technique versus the low ball technique". In this experiment, the goal was to have students agree to stop smoking for 18 hours. In the control group, 12% of the students selected agreed to the request, and only 4% actually complied. But after two "foot-in-the-door" steps followed by 2 engagements 95% of the students selected agreed to the request, and 90% complied.

Possible Applications

An obvious application of all these techniques is Marketing.
Management and Child Education are the other areas where they can be useful.

Management

Organizations of all kinds all require that a group of individuals work towards a common goal. And even when the culture inside the organization is very open (what the authors call industrial democracy), we are still in a configuration were people are being asked to do, or maybe they are being influenced into doing, something that makes sense for the organization as the best way to reach the goal.

Research by Kurt Lewin (1947 "group decision and social change") gave birth after the war to the practice of group decision making in industrial organizations. But what remains today from this orginal theory has been dilluted into two main versions that were further advertised, one with a "management" bias, and the other one with a "democratic" bias.

To understand how these versions differ (or not), one has to look at two important parameters within the entreprise:

• the internal social weight - impact on employees
• the organizational efficiency weight - impact on production

The "management" version of the original theory has been presented by Norman Maier who was studying group decision for better management. According to him:

• If a change has no internal social weight and no organizational efficiency weight (for example the color of the paint on the walls), then who makes the decision does not matter, and coin tossing is a good method
• If a change has no internal social weight but has organizational efficiency weight, then the decision should be taken by experts
• If a change has internal social weight but no organizational efficiency weight, then the decision should be taken as a group decision
• If a change has internal social weight and organizational efficiency weight, then there is potential conflict, and the situation requires a "moderator" to drive the group towards the decision that makes most sense for the organization, while it is taken with buy-in from the group. This means using techniques to guide the free choice, to gain engagement, and therefore through manipulation.

The "democracy" version of the original theory favors "listening to the group", by analysing the organization constraints and the personal conflicts within the group. And from this analysis it is expected that a solution will emerge at some point in time.

But while it seem to be a friendlier approach, this also can be seen as another form of manipulation: even if the intent is sincere, the fact that the indivudual agrees to get into the process means he has been "engaged". And from that point, he can be guided as well (and the organization needs it if we do not want the process to take forever), which is again manipulation, but using a psychologist instead of a moderator.

Education

In Education, well intended parents want their child to have choice. But it should not be choice betwen many options, but rather the choice to do or not to do: when somebody makes a choice, they internalize this choice and then rationalize it. This mechanism makes them more apt at making similar choices in the future. So in the case of a child, asking him/her to do the right thing (rather than giving them a real choice or trying to impose an action) and then doing an Attribution, will condition them to make similar decision in the future. During the internalization process, they will associate the behavior to the fact that they were doing the right thing because this is who they are rather than because they were doing what they are told.

Conclusion

Manipulation and propaganda are everywhere, and people usually feel unconfortable with the concept of manipulation. But Marketing propaganda is forcing commercials into a consumer brain without regard for his/her own interest while well intended manipulation can be seen as just another act of selling. Architecting behaviors should not be consider as bad as manipulating people by lying on the virtues of a product or trying to brain wash them through force fed commercials. In fine, and despite the unpopularity of the word "manipulation", using technologies of comportment is probably a more ethical choice, as long as the preliminary steps to engage the person are not based on lies or abuse.

Regardless of what one would like to think, it is clear that we are subject in our everyday life to manipulation. So people making decisions should always keep in mind of the following:

• be aware of the mechanism behind various behaviors
• do not hesitate to re-consider a decision
• learn to consider each decision individually (and not take into account previous decision)
• do not overestimate your freedom of choice

Freedom does not prevent us from doing things that are costly to us personnally and that are the result of somebody else expectation. From a political point of view, it means that one should not confuse living in a liberal society and living in a true democracy.