The theory underlying the Prisoner's Dilemma (and game theory, generally) are really important, but they aren't sufficient to explain human behavior. The kind o

The theory underlying the Prisoner's Dilemma (and game theory, generally) are really important, but they aren't sufficient to explain human behavior. The kind of rational analysis you're talking about makes some pretty big assumption about human beings that aren't universally true, in practice. Probably the biggest departure is that humans have a tremendous mental capacity to believe in a story that is more emotionally convenient, even when it directly contradicts a reality that is evidence-based but emotionally-upleasant. People have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to craft massive lies, and the uy into massive lies, even when it directly leads to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people... I'm not even talking about COVID here, I was actually thinking more about the behavior of Japanese civilians in Okinawa and Japan during the closing months of WWII. For whatever reason, humans have evolved an ability to operate for extended periods in a state of denial of reality. I presume it's not an accident, and that our ability to defy reality has some useful function that has been selected for, over time, by evolution. But there's absolutely nothing in our behavior, at either an individual level or on a whole- society level, that compels us to behave in an analytically rational way.