ohDEAR

TIT-FOR-TAT (ohgod)

Consider the following: two well-intentioned people adopt the TFT strategy for deciding whether to be cooperative with each other. All goes well for a while, but then one of these unintended slights occurs. Person A believes that Person B “defected” on her (whether defection here means intentionally revealing a secret, skimming profits, not working hard enough, etc.), when in actuality Person B’s behavior was accidental (i.e., she didn’t intend to act in an untrustworthy manner). Assuming they both adhere to TFT, the death spiral begins. While tit-for-tat can recover from defections when used against many strategies, this isn’t the case when it’s used against itself. The result is that noise in the system can doom what otherwise appeared to be the superior strategy; diz DeSteno.

“The Chen Family”, Fang Tong

TIT-FOR-MESS (ohGOD)

Although it’s true that all types of adult relationships — friendships, business partnerships, team memberships — involve some level of joint dependence for success, their spheres of influence are usually fairly narrow, meaning that individual breaches of trust, though unwelcome, don’t necessarily make one feel universally vulnerable. But this statement comes with one big caveat: love. When it comes to romantic relationships, most adults can have their seeming self-sufficiency momentarily obliterated. It’s not that we become paralyzed or cognitively helpless. We can still reason, research, and analyze. We can still work, cook, and plan for retirement. What we can’t do, though, is turn off that burning desire to connect with a partner — to share, to merge, to depend on, to bare our souls to him or her; disse o namorado do DeSteno.

Stick Garden, Madeline Cass