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An ancient proverb says, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This proverb suggests that I may choose to cooperate with one of my rivals when I know that this will allow us to defeat a common enemy.

Unfortunately, proverbs are not always good predictors of human behavior. After all, we have lots of proverbs that actually express contradictory beliefs. For example, we say “Look before you leap,” suggesting that careful exploration is important, but also “He who hesitates is lost” suggesting we ought to act quickly in the moment.

So, do people band together with rivals to defeat a common enemy?

This question was explored in a paper in the October, 2015 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Christin Schulze and Ben Newell.

They looked at a somewhat complicated situation. There were two participants in this setting. Participants were told that there are 100 chips in a container. 70 of them are black and 30 are white. On each trial, they have to guess which chip will get selected, and if they are right, they will win a small amount of money. The chip is always returned to the container after each draw, so there is always a 70% chance that the selected chip will be a black one. They will play this game repeatedly with their partner. Here is the catch. If both participants select the same outcome and that chip is selected, then they split the cash prize for that trial.

There are two strategies people could use to play this game. If each participant were playing the game alone, the ideal thing to do would be to pick the most common chip color. They would win the game 70% of the time, which is the best possible long-run outcome. This strategy is called maximizing.

If both participants in this study maximize, then they do better than if either of them picks the less common chip color, because on average they get 35% of the total winnings, but they would only get 30% of they picked the white chip instead.

However, the best long-term strategy for both players is for them to alternate picking the white and black chips so that on every trial, the participants are picking a different option. In this case, one of them always wins and on average they get 50% of the total amount of money available. This strategy requires the participants to cooperate with each other, even though they are likely to see each other as rivals.

In one study, participants were just tested in this environment to see what would happen. This study manipulated whether participants knew exactly how many chips of each color were in the container or whether they had to figure that out over the course of the study. That manipulation did not influence the outcome, so I won’t say anything else about it.

In this study, both participants tended to maximize. That is, they both selected the black chip most often. This strategy meant that they each got about 35% of the overall amount that could be won, because they typically both selected the same outcome.

In a second study, the participants were told to think of themselves explicitly as rivals trying to maximize how much they earned relative to the other participant. In this version of the study, participants also tended to maximize.

So, in both of these studies, participants did not cooperate with each other and maximize how much each of them were able to make.

In a third study, participants were told that they were competing against another team and that if they got more money combined than the other team, their winnings would double, though each person would still get whatever they won in the game.

In this version of the study, participants did a much better job of coordinating their selections so that they tended not to select the same option on each trial. On a large proportion of the decisions, the two participants chose different color chips.

Putting all of this together, then, these studies suggest that when you get people to think of themselves as having a common rival, then they put aside their self-interest and work together. The interesting thing about this experimental procedure is that when people cooperate, they actually do better overall than if they focus on their own self-interest. So, when people treat the task competitively, they actually miss out on the ideal strategy for making selections.

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