The Nuts Game: The Nature of Greed

I originally posted this commentary on 2007-12-31 13:09:47 and since then, there seems to be a theme of greed running thru the site ...

Jamess brought us Maybe "Greed is not Good" and Nick Benton's Corner posted by Carol White As the Era of Greed Ends ...

The Nuts Game

The following is taken from G-R-E-E-D where there is also an essay that is worth a read. I found this "study" or "game" quite interesting, and it really does say a lot about human nature and some of our baser instincts ... even though what is for "the greater good" is also in our own best interest, we still manage to allow greed and selfishness win out.

A small number of subjects (three or more) sit around a shallow, nonbreakable, open bowl [snip] which initially contains 10 hardware hexagonal nuts. [snip] An experimenter sits with the group and introduces the exercise as one where the player’s goal is to get as many of the nuts as possible. Players can take nuts from the bowl at any time and in any quantities after the start of the trial. The experimenter also explains that the number of nuts remaining in the bowl after each 10-second interval is automatically doubled from an outside source. [snip] This replenishment cycle continues until either an arbitrary time limit is reached or the bowl is emptied by the players. The experimenter can also set a ceiling to the number of nuts in the bowl throughout the trial [snip]. Subjects can be asked not to communicate.

To maximize their individual "harvests" of nuts, one would expect that each subject would restrain himself to taking one or two nuts out of the bowl each 10-second period: this allows the replenishment cycles to continue for some time (a typical game runs 2 minutes) and each subject eventually would end up with a sizeable score. In pilot work I have found that approximately 65% of groups never in practice reach the first replenishment stage because they exhaust the pool by taking all the nuts out in the first few moments of the game.