The Iterable Game: Reciprocity & The Golden Rule

Play and reciprocity

Proof of the ethos of reciprocity is evident even among rats. So asserted Jaak Panksepp who was an Estonian neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals. 

Panksepp had discovered something quite remarkable regarding rat behaviour. Rats love to play but there are rules which govern that play. His experiments involved using a big rat and a little rat, and by placing them in separate cages facing the rodent equivalent of a rat wrestling ring, he observed that both rats would beg to play with one another. Their desire for play was measured by how hard they would work to enter the ring where they could wrestle. Panksepp's research indicated that they worked very hard to do so. We can see this same behaviour in a dog park when your dog is utterly taken with the other dogs in the park. If my tiny five pound chihuahua is any indicator of the desire to play, I can assure you that he wishes that a great deal given how much he whimpers and pulls on his lead to get at them. And most dogs, even enormous mastiffs, reciprocate with him very well, if they are properly socialized. But back to Panksepp's findings, in the first bout the large rat invariably wins, yet in spite of its initial victory over the lesser rat both rats wish to play repeatedly. This was determined by separating them again and again then measuring how hard they would work to get back into the ring. Panksepp discovered that after the initial bout if the big rat didn't allow the little rat to win roughly 30% of the time in subsequent bouts, the little rat would no longer play.

The role of play in maintaining social order

Panksepp is credited with discovering the circuit in the mammalian brain which is wired to play. And the principle governing that circuitry is reciprocity. Which is why, in the end, a tyrant loses because play cannot be coerced. Even rats have a neurological circuit which governs the proper mode of conduct in a game which can be played iterably. This is the case for all mammals who live in a hierarchical social structure. To maintain social order and adhesion the participants must play reciprocally. Of course since humans are self aware we are are also the only ones who can articulate this rule. Which is why all civilized societies are organized around codified laws. If those laws aren't based upon reciprocity they will become cruel, arbitrary and/or difficult to understand. The social order in that society will then begin to break down. Lets at look of an example of a tyrannical behaviour affecting social order from our nearest kin in the higher animal kingdom, the chimpanzee from whose common ancestor we diverged some seven million years ago.

Primate Politics https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/01/chimpanzees-murder-cannibalism-senegal/#close

Dr. Jill Pruetz: https://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/people/faculty/pruetz.html  

"Since 2005, Pruetz and her colleagues have painstakingly studied the chimps of Fongoli, one of the few sites in western Africa where the apes have grown fully accustomed to human researchers. (Read more about Fongoli’s chimpanzees, which have been observed using sticks as spears.)


Pruetz’s observations have revealed a daily life full of politicking. Chimpanzee communities are led by “alpha males” and coalitions of male allies, flanked by females and the young. While females strike out for new groups after reaching sexual maturity, males stay in their birth communities, jockeying for social dominance with displays and shifting alliances. “It’s a bit like a soap opera,” says Pruetz.

In early 2005, Pruetz and her team identified Foudouko as the alpha male—the one male to which all others pant-grunted, a sign of submission. His furrowed brow and imperious air led one research assistant to nickname him Saddam, after the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

But in September 2007, Foudouko lost his grip on power, after his second-in-command—a male named Mamadou—was hobbled by a grievous leg injury. Mamadou’s fall from grace left Foudouko exposed, letting a group of younger males run him out of Fongoli in March 2008. After he disappeared, Pruetz and her colleagues thought he had died. (See intimate photos of Fongoli chimps.)

To Pruetz’s shock, Foudouko found his way back to Fongoli nine months later, a shadow of his former self. Now timid at the sight of humans, he was reduced to hiding behind trees or tufts of grass along Fongoli’s outskirts. For five long years, Foudouko would live the life of an exile, periodically ingratiating himself with the new alpha male—Mamadou’s brother David.

While Mamadou and David welcomed his return, the young males who had chafed under his rule were far less sympathetic. They regularly chased Foudouko out of the community, assailing him with strange calls the researchers did not recognize.

Scene of the Crime

Before dawn on the morning of June 15, 2013, Pruetz and her assistant Michel Sadiakho heard noises from about a half-mile away from their camp: a band of chimpanzees rapidly moving to the south from their nesting site, calling out in an uproar. Pruetz, ill with malaria, couldn’t go see the hubbub, leaving Sadiakho to run after them. (Read more about daily life in Fongoli.)

What Sadiakho saw devastated him. Foudouko, who was around 17 years old, lay there dead, his hands covered in bite marks and scratches—implying that two other chimpanzees had held him down as others beat his head and torso. A gaping wound on his foot, perhaps a bite, had peeled back much of the skin and likely led to severe blood loss.


As morning came, Pruetz and her team watched many of Fongoli’s male and female chimpanzees harass—and partially cannibalize—his body, tearing out his throat and biting at his genitals."

Tyranny never lasts forever and those affected by it don't easily forget or forgive. A big commanding male may exercises brutal dominance for a time but sooner or later, when he is asleep, ill or inattentive, a few of his lesser mates are likely to ravage him because he had failed to deal with them reciprocally and fairly.

The phenomenon of pay to play, just like a rat 😂

"Oh! The good ol' Hockey game, is the best game you can name. And the best game you can name, is the good ol' Hockey game.", so says Stompin' Tom, and he's right!

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And those fortunate enough to have them undoubtedly gladly pay the high price. Why? To watch competent expert athletes engage in reciprocal play over repeated games until the best team wins. This is instinctively admirable. We all know it. We do not admire those who cheat, connive and brutalize their way to the winning the "cup" nor do regulations which are based upon reciprocity permit such. The game couldn't be played without clear rules constraining that play. Rules which have consequences if not followed. We even hire people to access if those rules are adhered to and subsequently punish those who break them. Nothing is arbitrary. Although distinctive talent and ability are a vital part of this process of play, the players who are most admired by their fans are those who cooperate with their teammates to develop their teammates' skills as well as that of their own. Which is why those are the players most often selected to be team captain.

Can you imagine if the current insistence on applying equity laws regarding equality of outcome were applied to hockey?  If winning was not based solely on fair play and competence? Actually I am waiting for this to happen given the outrage surrounding the now infamous Don Cherry incident but I will leave that discussion aside for the moment to drive home my point. Of all the hockey teams everywhere in the world playing hockey only one team will emerge at the end of the season drinking champagne out of Lord Stanley's Cup. Namely the team who played the game repeatedly and successfully while following the rules. And winning one year certainly does not guarantee that that team will win the next.

The top one percent of the successful in any market is seldom held for long by the same persons, team or company. Having stated this, there will always be a top one percent because there are mathematical principles at work which determine outcomes. So, let's examine what these principles are.

Prices Law and the Pareto Principle: "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."— Matthew 25:29, RSV.

This is sometimes referred to as the Matthew Principle regarding inequality of outcome. This principle is also reflected in Price's Law and the Pareto Principle. 

"Price’s law predicts that the square root of a population produces 50% of the products produced. If I have 100 bricks produced by 100 brick layers, 10 of the brick layers (100 squared=10), produced 50 bricks. If I continued this equation, the remainder population would eventually demonstrate a graph that at some point would be very close to showing 20% of the work being done by 80% of the population. Which leads to the next point…

The Pareto Principle describes that 80% of the output, is generated by 20% of the actions. It, unlike Price’s law, is an observation of the natural inequality of many things in life, but in itself, is not a mathematical expression."

Equality of opportunity is a noble goal however it does nothing to describe outcomes. It does not tell us about who will come out on top repeatedly over time nor does it describe the fact that those who are at the top will not necessarily remain the same. This is a fact that the postmodern left simply cannot seem to understand. As an example, it is beneficial for the NHL to have the largest pool of competent players possible from which to draw. This is why so many children are given the opportunity to learn how to play hockey at their local arenas. Out of all those children very few will make it to more senior leagues such as the Junior A's and B's. And, out of the most competent among them very few will move on to the NHL. Of all NHL players very few become a phenomenon like Wayne Gretzky. Fewer still will have the honour of drinking champagne out of Lord Stanley's Cup. Maximizing the opportunity to learn to play the game does nothing to predict the outcome other than to provide a larger group from which the most competent can emerge.

The fact that the opportunity to play benefits all the children who take that opportunity cannot be ignored nor can the fact that not all of them will not succeed equally. But what we may all succeed at is to be found in the old proverb, “It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.” The essential ethos in life is reciprocity. Our very DNA is wired to it. For "Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets." — Matthew 7:12. The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as you wish to be treated. It is the axiomatic starting point of playing an iterable game voluntarily throughout our life and this is a game which may never be coerced. As soon as the game is coerced the game will collapse. Which is why totalitarian societies are doomed to fail. This rule is to be found not only in many religions and cultures, but is rooted in our evolutionary biology itself.