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Social hijack is when individuals take control of a society for their own ends, as a virus can hijack a cell to serve its purposes. A society can be governed in various ways: Autocracy is control by one person, aristocracy is control by an elite, plutocracy is control by the rich, democracy is control by all the citizens and anarchy is no-one in charge. Plato’s ideal leader was a benevolent dictator who enforced social order to create synergy and justly returned society’s gains to its citizens, i.e. enforced social synergy and denied corruption. However centralizing control to create social order by an autocratic king, emperor or pharaoh, invites social hijack.

Dictators can be the worst of leaders if they use society’s performance for their own personal luxury or power ends. Such corruption is not legitimate, so they must repress individuality by police state control and indoctrinate the masses into blind service by media propaganda. This makes corrupt dictatorships:

1.   Unstable. If those who create social wealth gain nothing from it, they have, as Marx notes, “nothing to lose but their chains”. A privileged aristocracy living in luxury while the workers who create that wealth starve invites a grass-roots revolution. Hence corrupt dictatorships are unstable.

2.   Impermanent. Royal bloodline dynasties ensure that when kings, emperors, pharaohs eventually die the power vacuum is filled by their offspring. Yet inevitably time produces incompetent or even insane offspring whose foolish acts lead to a civil war and the collapse of the dynasty. Hence corrupt dictator bloodlines eventually fall.

3.   Poor. When a society blindly follows the whims of leader(s) who are isolated by their wealth from world realities, it inevitably becomes incompetent and fails to generate produce from the world. Hence corrupt dictatorships are poor.

Societies with absolute rulers, like Burma and North Korea, tend to be poor as their rulers replace productivity requirements by their personal social agendas; e.g. in Zimbabwe Mugabe addressed social inequity by driving white farmers off productive farms, then giving them to his cronies who looted but did not plant, grow or harvest. Equality without productivity turned what was the bread-basket of Africa into the basket-case of Africa. Likewise Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused hundreds of millions to die by incompetence. Yet such disasters need not trigger revolution, as only a new social system can replace an old one. If new social systems are repressed, the country simply remains poor. A corrupt dictatorship that maintains social order is an evolutionary dead-end, and only the leader’s death allows change.

Prosperity needs both competence and synergy. An ordered society without competence remains poor, as synergy is the interest paid on the capital of competence—if there is no capital there is no interest either. Synergies from social order (Rule 2) increase the competence gains of natural competition (Rule 1), but cannot displace them. Yet neither is Rule 1 alone sufficient, as a society of competent individuals feuding among themselves is also weak. Most now reject the Social Darwinist argument that since nature weeds out the weak so should society because it ignores the ties that bind us and reduces creative diversity. Just as Nature tolerates an extraordinary diversity of life, so it behooves a society to be tolerant of diversity, as who knows which citizen will invent a better future?

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Social order is the traditional way to create synergy. By Rule 2, social dilemmas are solved when people form a higher social unit. Only when tragedy of the commons farmers form a village can they institute a grazing roster to preserve the commons. Game theory arbitrarily excludes the social agreements critical to solving social dilemmas (Aumann, 1998).

A society’s social order is the degree to which its members agree to follow common rules. In perfect social order everyone is of “one mind”, like an ordered crystal whose constituent atoms all move as one. Social anarchy in contrast is like a gas, whose atoms all move randomly according to individual exigencies. Freedom lets members of a society choose whether to act as one or in opposition, which allows creative acts against the norm. Enforcing order avoids anarchy, but also reduces freedom and creativity.

If a community acts as one (social order), whether by religion, culture, law or coercion, social dilemmas give way to synergy; e.g. if a village sets up a game reserve to stop poaching, it conserves its wild life not only for itself but to also create, for example, a tourist income. It can do this by physical barriers like fences, punishments or by declaring the land sacred, so those who defy the gods are banished.

Yet enforcing order, even psychologically, is a blunt instrument. It makes members effectively ants, i.e. denies freedom. Socializing citizens to follow Rule 2 engages social evolution to synergy but disengages the individual evolution of competence and creativity. The struggle between social and individual evolution is reflected in the historical swings between the rise of civilizations and their fall at the hands of more competent barbarians. Hence social performance requires both competition to increase competence and order to increase synergy.

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 In the social environment model, people in a social system are in a social environment within the world environment (Figure 5.4). This summarizes the previous conclusion that a person in a social unit is subject to both the homo economicus and homo sociologicus world views. Since every social exists within a physical world environment, defection is always an option. While synergy requires people to work together to achieve its gains, crime is when people try to in effect “short-circuit” this path, to get immediate gains at the expense of others.

In general, we do not see environments because they are too close not too far away. Just as a fish cannot see water, or a bird the air, we as social animals tend to be social environment blind. We see the world environment that limits our actions and dispenses consequences but not the social environment that generates community benefits like roads and electricity. Yet a social system is an environment to its members because it imposes requirements on them (laws and norms) and dispenses their gains and losses (salaries and taxes). It does the latter by social tokens like money, which are exchanged for world values like food.

People in a society operate under two environments, one that rewards them for competing and one that rewards them for cooperating. It follows that the community needs to satisfy both environments. Thus social system can fail by incompetence with respect to its world environment, as when a wasteful company goes bankrupt, or from social corruption, when the group fails to create synergy or prevent crime. This approach supports Adam Smith’s view that people competing in a free market can help society only if the competition does not turn into rampant crime.

Table 5.6 shows the possibilities, depending on whether people follow Rule 1 to benefit the self, or Rule 2 to benefit the community. As can be seen, the “selfish” Rule 1 directs individuals to choose the first row, while the “good” Rule 2 directs them to choose the first column. Following Rule 1 with no regard for others leads to widespread crime that degenerates into conflict, while following Rule 2 with no regard for the self leads to sacrifice and eventually the loss of that person’s value. Thus in this model, both rules are required. This model also works in biology, as the first row is symbiosis, commensalism and predation respectively. People however have a choice, between their instincts for personal gain (Rule 1) and their social training for synergy (Rule 2).

If people only followed Rule 1, to benefit the SELF, then crime would prevail and society would collapse. If they only followed Rule 2, to benefit the COMMUNITY, we would be like ants willing to sacrifice themselves for the colony, locked in under genetically bred pharaohs. Our actual social path was a pragmatic combination of Rules 1 and 2. Taking what is positive for SELF+COMMUNITY gives opportunity, synergy and service as the prime directives of human society. In  society, most people take opportunities, fair trade synergies, and give service to their fellow citizens as needed. These are not mutually exclusive, as they serve the community in war but still try to survive personally, try to get ahead without breaking laws, and help others if the cost is not too much. Yet that people naturally help others is not part of game theory. Only the social environment model makes helping others just as critical as helping yourself.

The problem facing humanity was how to combine Rule 1 and Rule 2 in a way that is feasible, i.e. doable by people. A well known solution is the utilitarian ideal of “the greatest good for the greatest number,” as popularized by Dr Spock’s sacrifice in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It seems simple to prefer the greatest good but the calculation over time gets confusing? For example, is an aircraft crash that loses hundreds of lives today but causes safety changes that saves thousands of lives in the future “good”? Should governments then crash planes or sink ferries to introduce needed safety measures? The problem with the utilitarian solution is that the greatest good of millions of people over hundreds of years is not calculable by anyone, let alone a majority of people. It is valid but not feasible.

Nor does a simple AND of Rules 1 and 2 work well. It is feasible but not optimal, as people acting only to benefit both themselves and society would often not act at all. Finally, any sort of weighted trade of social utility against individual utility raises complex questions, like how much social good is my individual loss worth, or how much individual good warrants a social loss? On this logic, old people would go to war as they have less to lose, while young people would want to stay at home. What is needed is a rule combination that is simple enough for people to conceive and do. Such a solution is cognitive anchoring, fixing one rule and then applying the other (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

This approach suggests the following combinations:

Rule 3a: If {SU(ai) ≥ SU(aj) and IU(ai) > IU(aj)} then prefer ai to aj

In words: Choose acts that do not harm society but benefit oneself

Rule 3b: If {IU(ai) ≥ IU(aj) and SU(ai) > SU(aj)} then prefer ai to aj

In words: Choose acts that do not harm oneself but benefit society

Following Rule 3a, people seek gains that don’t harm society as defined by its laws, i.e. one competes by the rules.

Following Rule 3b, people help social others if it doesn’t harm themselves, i.e. those with “enough” give to others.

These SELF-COMMUNITY rules are easier to apply than ideals like calculating the greatest good for the greatest number, or the complex trade-off of individual vs. community gains/losses. They are valid and feasible. Yet while current society has institutionalized and benefited from the profit Rule 3a, Rule 3b remains largely ignored.

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The zero-sum barrier is the obstacle to social synergy. Game theory differentiates between zero-sum and non-zero-sum interactions. In games like poker, my gain  is your loss so I win at your expense. Essentially, everyone fights, and the winner takes all. If you imagine a reward “pie”, a zero-sum game involves taking another’s slice, to increase your share at the other’s expense. When nations go to war this is the goal, but taking another’s land often involves a war that lays waste to industry, infrastructure and resources, e.g. Hitler conquered Europe but the process left it in ruins. So in zero-sum interactions, getting the other’s slice also shrinks the whole pie (Figure 5.3a). If we all fight, we all become poor, as dog-eat-dog societies evidence.

In contrast, in non-zero-sum interactions the goal is to increase the whole pie including my slice, as in team games where if the team wins we all win. Fair trade is a non-zero-sum interaction that allows both parties to win. So synergy works by increasing the shared pie for all, making every slice larger (Figure 5.3b).

Non-zero-sumness is an unpleasant term, but the argument that achieving it is the secret to human prosperity is a strong one (Wright, 2001). Every society has had to face the challenge of how to overcome the zero-sum barrier: the tendency of its citizens to defect on social synergy. Our extraordinary success as a race can be attributed not to our intelligence but to our social ability to work together to achieve synergy gains. Humanity alone, among all the intelligent life on earth, by being ultra-social, overcame the zero-sum barrier.

Overcoming the zero-sum barrier is also important in socio-technical systems, as to enable synergies they have to deny defections. While traditional word processing software just has to increase individual performance, socio-technical systems must also increase community synergies and defend against anti-social defections. If users just followed Rule 1, systems like Wikipedia would not work, as no one would give to others for no gain. If people just followed Rule 2 like ants, these systems would not need defenses against defections, but this is not the case.

Synergy occurs in forums like AnandTech, where if anyone in a group solves a problem then everyone gets the answer. The larger the group, the more likely someone can solve in seconds a problem you might take days to solve. Likewise in online security, if one person gets a virus and the community comes up with a cure then everyone can get protection. Same again functions let Amazon readers tap into the experiences of others, to find books bought by those who bought the book they are looking at now. Wikipedia users correct errors of fact, supply references and offer examples for everyone. Table 5.5 shows how various socio-technologies increase synergy and reduce defections.

Table 5.5 Synergies and defections in online systems

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The prisoner’s dilemma was thought to be an exception until such cases were found to be common. For example, in the volunteer dilemma, a group needs volunteers to survive but since it pays individuals to leave it to others, no-one volunteers, and so the group collapses, i.e. they become a set of individuals acting alone. It is now recognized that social dilemmas like the volunteer dilemma represent a generic problem that is found in all social groups (Diekmann & Lindenberg, 2001).

Social dilemmas arise when Rule 1 contradicts Rule 2, i.e. when what benefits the individual does not benefit the group, or when what benefits the group does not benefit the individual. The dilemma is not that people selfishly follow Rule 1 or that they ethically follow Rule 2, but that they are caught between. Certainly game theory’s Rule 1 is insufficient, as people in social dilemma games are much more cooperative than game theory predicts (Poundstone, 1992). The mystery is not why people synergize or why they are selfish, but how they can be both. Game theory implies that society cannot succeed but it already has. Deducing that social cooperation is irrational (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944) is like deducing that bumblebees cannot fly by the laws of physics, when in fact they do. In science, we change the theory not the facts. Human instincts know what human logic does not: that synergy works.

Social dilemmas cannot be solved at the personal level because an honest person among cheats is just a fool. One person trying to synergize in a social dilemma is just a sucker, so individuals alone cannot solve social dilemmas. In the tragedy of the commons, the farmer who on principle does not graze just misses out and the commons is destroyed anyway. The choices for individuals in social dilemmas are all bad, so how did we achieve synergy at all?

The solution to all social dilemmas is for the social unit to change the gain-loss equation. This is not easy. It has taken thousands of years of often bitter struggle to stabilize massive synergies like global trade and international peace. The heroes of our social evolution were those who saw beyond themselves. The path to social synergy has on both sides the cliffs of defection. We alone among the mammals have crossed the zero-sum barrier into the lush valley of massive social synergy (Wright, 2001). We were lucky.

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Social defection occurs when a person in a social group acts by Rule 1. Anti-social acts like stealing illustrate individuals taking from a social interaction but not giving anything back. They occur when the drive to get something for nothing permeates the social system, driving not only crime but also bargains and gambling. Every social synergy has a corresponding defection, e.g. in trade, when sellers can defect by false advertising, shoddy products or bad warranties, buyers buy less. Buyers can also defect, e.g. buy an expensive ball gown, wear it to a ball, then falsely request a refund, saying it did not fit. If many customers do that, sellers offer less, e.g. refuse refunds (also defect), even though refunds benefit both seller (more sales) and buyer (less risk).

Game theory points out the fly in the social ointment of synergy: If my acts give your gains and yours give mine, what if I take from you but give nothing back? On a personal level it always pays to defect, e.g. for a seller to give shoddy goods or for a buyer’s cheque to bounce. Yet if the cheated “sucker” does not repeat the interaction, both lose their synergy gains, so cheaters destroy their own success. If a crime-wave “succeeds”, the social benefits it feeds on dry up. Crime is like a social parasite that kills its host. The idea that one can get something for nothing is the myth of our generation. All crime is essentially socially unsustainable.

In game theory, mutual synergy is like a ball balanced on the crest of a hill that must sooner or later roll permanently down into the valley of mutual defection. Yet societies still generate synergy, even after thousands of years. Crime can short-circuit the link between social acts and synergy but it has not prevailed, although defections do cascade into social collapse, as if I defect reduce the synergy gains of others, increasing the pressure on them to also defect. As more people defect, this increases the pressure on the remainder to also defect, etc. Hence a common reason given for cheating is that “everyone is doing it” (Callahan, 2004). A few defections can cause a chain reaction that destabilizes an entire social system.

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Social synergy is the difference between what individuals produce by acting together compared to what they produce as individuals working alone. It can be positive or negative, where trade is a positive synergy and war a negative one. People tend to join communities with positive synergy and leave those with negative synergy, whether people leaving websites plagued by conflicts or refugees fleeing war torn nations. The performance of a group at the social level depends on its ability to generate synergy. Synergy is a property of the social interactions, not the social individuals. In the prisoner’s dilemma, the interaction is the loyal friendship total (10) less the defect total (2) gives a synergy of +8 years. In the tragedy of the commons, the village cooperative total (2,500) less the competitive total (1,600) gives a synergy of +900 tons of beef.

Human progress has stabilized synergy for larger groups. Civilization has taken humanity from tribes to cities, from cities to states, and from states to mega-states like Europe, India, China and America (Diamond, 1998). Each stage of this social evolution required more complex social and physical systems to succeed. That larger groups allow larger synergies is why people are better off today than ever before in history. Technology now makes genuinely global exchanges possible, and the synergies are enormous. We think in terms of nations but already the world’s top 100 economies include 69 corporations. Multi-nationals grew because tapping the world gave more than tapping a nation, but there is now a backlash as faceless corporations do not represent “us” as nations do. Multi-nationals that came to be seen as “bad” could not take up the Internet offer of global synergy. 

Science illustrates the benefit of synergy. Suppose 100 researchers each make different knowledge advances of equal value. Following a zero-sum model as private companies do, they keep their results secret, as why let competitors benefit from my work? In contrast, academics following a non-zero sum model share their research. In the first case, the total knowledge increase is 100 units of human understanding, but in the second case it is 1000 units, as each researcher gets 99 new ideas from others as well as their own. This is a hundred-fold synergy gain vs. keeping research secret. If past scientists had kept their research secret, benefits like electricity may not have occurred. Yet the decoding of the human genome sequence was nearly patented for commercial gain rather than made available to all. What is the justification for people patenting what Nature created? The the problem with academic journals is that they have become knowledge fortresses because the academic system itself is essentially a feudal knowledge system that doesn’t effectively use social synergy.

Synergy arises when people work to create others outcomes. It is not just people adding their efforts, say to lift a heavy log together. It is when specialists add value for others; e.g. if a fisherman trades excess fish for a farmer’s excess grain, each gives an extra they don’t need for a deficit they do. Conflict is the reverse, where each creates negative results for the other. Large communities produce more because productivity based on individual competence increases linearly with group size. In contrast, synergy based on citizen interactions increase geometrically with group size, so large communities that synergize produce much more. When millions synergize, as today, the output gains are enormous. Synergy is why ordinary people today have better food, healthcare and entertainment than the richest aristocrats of the middle ages, and today’s rich have more money than they can spend in a lifetime.

Synergy is especially applicable online, as one can give information to others without losing it oneself. So when the Internet allows millions to share information, the effect is especially powerful, as systems like Google illustrate. The prosperity of modern society is based on synergy.

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The tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968) extends the two-person prisoner’s dilemma to a case of many people in a group and  applies to whaling, forest and wildlife conservation issues. In it, some farmers each with cows and a plot of land live by a common grass area. If a farmer’s herd also grazes the commons it grows fat, but if over 50% of farmers do so, the commons is overgrazed and dies off.

Working as individuals each farmer’s logic is:

•   My actions are independent of those of the other farmers.

•   If ≤ 50% graze it pays me to graze, as I get more value.

•   If > 50% graze, it still pays me to graze, as I get more value initially.

It always pays each farmer to graze the commons by game theory so they must destroy it. In a hypothetical case, say 100 farmers each get a ton of beef per month grazing their own plots, and three more tons grazing the commons. This reduces by one ton each month of overgrazing, to become barren in three months. Table 5.3 shows farmer outcomes by choice for 10 months. By Rule 1, the average graze benefit is 28, while the average not-graze benefit is 10, so graze is preferred. Destroying the commons to everyone’s loss is the equilibrium point predicted by Game Theory.

Table 5.3. Tragedy of the commons individual outcomes

Working as a social unit gives a different conclusion. The social acts available to the village are by what percentage to graze the commons. Table 5.4 shows the expected outcome per farmer for overgrazing is 1,600 tons over 10 months, while the expected not overgrazing value is 2,500, making it the preferred choice. A village following the social Rule 2 will save the commons as a valuable community resource.

Social cooperation works: Axelrod invited programs for a simulated survival of the fittest social interaction tournament to see which survived. He found that none of the eight most successful programs initiated defection (Axelrod, 1984). Nasty programs succeeded at first but in time ran out of victims and met only other nasties, while cooperative programs found allies and prospered. Social cooperation evolved as the best strategy.

Table 5.4. Tragedy of the commons social outcomes

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Game theory is the systematic study of the “rational” choices of individuals in social interactions. It presents the essentials of social situations for analysis and underlies many economic, political and management theories. Yet its validity was challenged by the discovery of a scenario called the prisoner’s dilemma.

In the prisoner’s dilemma, two prisoners (Bill and Bob) each face two-year jail terms on circumstantial evidence for a crime they did commit. Each is separately offered a plea bargain, to testify against the other. If the other does not testify, he walks free but his partner gets seven years in jail. If both testify, both get six years (one off for testifying). In outcome utility terms the options are:

1.   Bill and Bob stay silent and each gets two years in jail.

2.   Bill confesses for immunity and Bob gets seven years.

3.   Bob confesses for immunity and Bill gets seven years.

4.   Bill and Bob both confess and both get six years jail.

Table 5.1 shows the outcome payoff matrix as free years out of seven. If both cooperate and keep quiet, both get five free years, but if both defect and testify they only get one free year each. The temptation is for one to defect and get seven free years, while the other cooperating sucker gets none. As individuals following Rule 1, each prisoner concludes:

•   Whether the other person cooperates or defects doesn’t depend on my choice.

•   If he defects, it pays me to defect, as then I get 1 not 0 free years.

•   If he cooperates, it still pays me to defect, as I get 7 not 5 free years.

Table 5.1. Prisoner’s dilemma—Individual outcomes

Game theory concludes that rationally it always pays individuals to defect, as the expected defect average gain is 4 but the cooperate average is only 2.5. If both parties follow game theory’s Rule 1, defect/defect is the equilibrium state. People rationally maximizing profit creates the worst possible result for all!

However working as a social unit following Rule 2, gives a different result. The available social acts for the pair are mutual cooperation and mutual defection with expected gains of 10 and 2 respectively (Table 5.2). If both parties follow Rule 2, mutual cooperation is the new equilibrium state. So when social cohesion is allowed, simulated agents in a prisoner’s dilemma situation evolve a cooperative equilibrium (Dayton-Johnson, 2003).

In performance terms, Rule 1 gives 2 free years of value while Rule 2 gives 10 free years, a considerable net gain. Game theory assumes that rational beings must calculate payoffs for the individual, but it is just as rational to calculate payoffs for the social unit as a whole (Table 5.2). After all, Rule 2 is just Rule 1 applied to the social unit instead of the individual unit. It is just as logical and just as pragmatic.

Conversely, it is illogical to label alternatives to individual self-interest irrational if they generate more value, given that we ourselves are a society of cells, and cancer is the result when one of them acts for itself alone regardless of the rest. Since what people define as “self” often includes the community around them (Persky, 1995), both rules are equally rational and pragmatically grounded.

Table 5.2. Prisoner’s dilemma—Social outcomes

Figure 5.2 shows the Homo-sociologicus model of human behavior, where social  units of cooperating individuals compete in a world environment, e.g. tribes or colonies. While competition is evident in nature, cooperation is equally common in the animal kingdom, e.g. social insects like ants form massively cooperative colonies that are so successful they account for at least a third of all insect biomass. In Figure 5.2, the unit that competes and survives is not the individual but the social unit, so soldier ants die protecting an ant colony as they can’t survive without it anyway. The genetics that drives their behavior is based on the colony not the individual, and it evolved because individuals working together create more value than those working alone (Ridley, 1996). Indeed, our body is a colony of cells working together to such a degree that they can no longer survive alone. In this situation, individuals in a social unit perform, in evolutionary terms, based on the sum of the actions of its members.

Biologists now argue for multi-level selection—evolutionary selection for groups as well as individuals (Wilson & Sober, 1994). Social cooperation changes the evolutionary reward rule—individuals still act but the acts selected for are those that give value to the social unit not the individual. This then suggests a social alternative to game theory’s Rule 1:

Rule 2: If a social unit S of { I1, I2 …} individuals faces social action choices {a1, a2 …} with expected social utilities SU(a1), SU(a2), …} then:

If SU(ai) > SU(aj) then prefer ai over aj

In words: In a social unit, individuals prefer acts expected to give more value to the community.   

When it is the colony that lives or dies not just the ant, the unit of evolution changes. Value outcomes are calculated for the group as a whole. Natural selection now favors Rule 2, i.e. the evolution of behaviors that help the colony survive. For ants, natural selection favors acts that benefit the community, not the individual ant. Applying Rule 2 to human societies explains the evolution of social acts. Social acts are those that benefit the social unit not the individual; e.g. defending the society even if I might die, as soldiers do, is a social act independent of my individual state. Social castes can be dedicated to social acts, like worker or soldier ants.

Rule 2 applied to human society gives people who prefer acts that benefit the community (Bone, 2005). This is Marx’s communist man, who is politically motivated to common acts that benefit the community as a whole. The psychological basis for this motive is Social Identity Theory (Hogg, 1990), where groups form when members share a common identity, or idea of themselves. If anyone attacks one member of such a group, all group members feel attacked and respond accordingly. Most country’s defense forces work by this rule, as servicemen and women are expected to give their lives for society. To clarify the difference, in Figure 5.1 individuals act according to the benefits for themselves, while in Figure 5.2 they act according to the benefits for the social unit regardless of its effect upon themselves individually. These two pragmatic rules, one at the individual level and one at the community level, both based on evolutionary principles, interact to create social dilemmas.

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