Using Game Theory a Harvard study has come to the pleasant conclusion that nice guys do finish first. However it comes with a caveat -- only in the long run and only in situations where equals are involved.
In the long run the nice guy may give up being nice, or may be finished. Also, this study does not seem to correlate with the dominant paradigm I have seen in the professional / corporate world -- which tends to reward fire-spitting, angry, get-my-work-done type personalities. Normally the boss-employee relationship does not anyway involve equals. But even between peers there is competition and some people tend to put their names/faces before their peers' or manipulate circumstances to goldplate an achievement as *mainly* an outcome of their intelligence / hardwork.
The Harvard study focused on 100 Boston-area football players:
Playing the same game over and over — a punishment-heavy version of the classic one-on-one brinksmanship game of prisoner's dilemma...Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said study author Martin Nowak.
..."On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers," Nowak said his experiments found.
Those who escalate the conflict very often wound up doomed.
...The study looked at games between equals. Punishment does seem to have a place in games when one player is dominant and needs to enforce submission, Nowak said.
In Nowak's experiment, the students played more than 8,000 games of prisoner's dilemma, using dimes to reward and punish. The normal game of prisoner's dilemma gives two players two options: cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, each ends up winning a dime. If both defect, each gets nothing. If one cooperates and the other defects, the cooperative player loses 20 cents and the defector wins 30 cents.
Nowak then added a "costly punishment" component. A player could choose to punish someone who didn't cooperate. That penalized the non-cooperative person 40 cents, but the other player had to pay a dime to mete out the punishment.
When Nowak compared how much money people earned or lost in the long run, there was a noticeable correlation between punishment and overall money. The players who punished their opponents the least, or not at all, made the most money.
Those who punished the most made the least money.
When faced with a nasty opponent, turning the other cheek and continuing to cooperate — or at least not handing out punishment — paid off more in the long run, the study found
From your work life what is your experience? Do you find that nice guys finish first -- well in time that they survive or have you met more workplace jerks than you can count?
