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While I played Prisoner’s Dilemma, my goal wasn’t to get as many coins as possible which may sound odd. My goal was to see how the system worked and why this was a dilemma. When I played it, I tended to cooperate all the way through until Serendip decided to stop letting me cooperate. When I tried to mix up my cooperation against competing, I never seemed to be satisfied with the results I got. When I cooperated and competed, the game immediately gave me a sense of angst and nerves. I didn’t like that I was competing for no reason except to win when I could easily keep cooperating to be satisfied with my coin amount. Personally, I was satisfied with my score when I was just cooperating and the angst I got from competing wasn’t worth the few extra coins that I was getting.

I think an example of a prisoner’s dilemma operating in my life would be any new friendship made during college. When you are making new friends, you don’t often “compete” with them because you want to win at something. I usually cooperate with people and get the feel of the person before “competing” against something. If you begin to “compete” too early in a friendship, the opposite person may be a weird/odd vibe and not know when to “compete” or cooperate.

And I think that creating a win-win situation in our class may be a bit difficult because we have so many different personalities with different opinions that it can be hard to come to a consensus about something. At the same time, I can picture the group to be able to compromise with each other over things, with Peter, of course, having to the mediator.