A Game of Greed

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]You are invited to play a game. You against someone else. Each of you have [music] two buttons in front of you. A red one that says steal and a green one that says split. The game is simple. If each of you press the split button, you both get $100. If each of you press the steal button, you both get only $10. But if one chooses to steal while the other to split, the thief gets $200 while the opponent gets nothing. So, what do you do? It seems pretty obvious [music] you have to steal every time. This way, no matter what your opponent does, you don't risk losing anything. But the best outcome is actually happening if both of you trust each other. This is called the prisoner's dilemma, a thought experiment that got people debating over it for over 100 years. And it seems like if you play this game over multiple sessions, the best strategy you can have is called tit-for-tat. [music] You never start by stealing and you always do what your opponent did.