Actually, I remember reading a pretty long article in New Scientist suggesting that actually, most of the time, people do the right thing in a crisis. That the New York sort of experience is the routine one. As long as most people generally have the idea that cooperation will help them survive, they can be remarkably helpful and useful - and it is a systemic weakness of civil defence and disaster relief kind of stuff that they underestimate the extent to which people are helpful and trying hard to do the right thing, and overestimate the extent to which they should be controlled and mistrusted.
The problem is that as soon as people think they are being discriminated against, lied to, or used, their cooperative altruistic stance is quite fragile. People quickly switch to hostility if they meet hostility. It is possibly all one of those aspects of human nature that appear to match game theory.
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Date: 2008-09-01 07:45 am (UTC)The problem is that as soon as people think they are being discriminated against, lied to, or used, their cooperative altruistic stance is quite fragile. People quickly switch to hostility if they meet hostility. It is possibly all one of those aspects of human nature that appear to match game theory.