Possibly relevant anecdote: Once I was with a group of people who tried various psychological experiments. That day, the organizers proposed that we play iterated Prisonner’s Dilemma. I was like “yay, I know the winning strategy, this will be so easy!”
I lost. Almost everyone always defected against me; there wasn’t much I could do to get points comparable to other people who mostly cooperated with each other.
After the game, I asked why. (During the game, we were not allowed to communicate, just to write our moves.) The typical answer was something like: “well, you are obviously very smart, so no matter what I do, you will certainly find a way to win against me, so my best option is to play it safe and always defect, to avoid the worst outcome”.
I am not even sure if I should be angry at them. I suppose that in real life, when you have about average intelligence, “don’t trust people visibly smarter than you” is probably a good strategy, on average, because there are just too many clever scammers walking around. At the same time I feel hurt, because I am a natural altruist and cooperator, so this feels extremely unfair, and a loss for both sides.
(There were other situations in my life where the same pattern probably also applied, but most of the time, you just don’t know why other people do whatever they do. This time I was told their reasoning explicitly.)
Possibly relevant anecdote: Once I was with a group of people who tried various psychological experiments. That day, the organizers proposed that we play iterated Prisonner’s Dilemma. I was like “yay, I know the winning strategy, this will be so easy!”
I lost. Almost everyone always defected against me; there wasn’t much I could do to get points comparable to other people who mostly cooperated with each other.
After the game, I asked why. (During the game, we were not allowed to communicate, just to write our moves.) The typical answer was something like: “well, you are obviously very smart, so no matter what I do, you will certainly find a way to win against me, so my best option is to play it safe and always defect, to avoid the worst outcome”.
I am not even sure if I should be angry at them. I suppose that in real life, when you have about average intelligence, “don’t trust people visibly smarter than you” is probably a good strategy, on average, because there are just too many clever scammers walking around. At the same time I feel hurt, because I am a natural altruist and cooperator, so this feels extremely unfair, and a loss for both sides.
(There were other situations in my life where the same pattern probably also applied, but most of the time, you just don’t know why other people do whatever they do. This time I was told their reasoning explicitly.)