Doves win over hawks!

Thanks Sunyu on Unsplash

A few days ago, our Peace Fellowship class was split into two teams to play a negotiation game based on the prisoner’s dilemma (for those who know it).  For three and a half hours, we debated, negotiated, managed diverse needs and beliefs and stressed at each round as we waited to see what the other team had decided to do. It was super heated, intense and rough!  And at the end, we had two main learnings:

(1) Watch out for spoilers.  The professors had planted 3 spoilers in each team who did not want the two sides to come to an agreement.  They were incentivized to make both sides lose. The other team had huge difficulty managing their spoilers who almost derailed the outcome for them.

(2) Despite our belief that hawks (aggressive behavior) always wins, our team’s dove behavior (building trust for a win-win outcome) actually put us in a position of total control of the game at the end.

Explanation:  Towards the middle of the game, the other team acted like a hawk while we remained doves throughout the game.  The game was structured in such a way that it was impossible to win the game without a strategic alliance with the other team in the last two rounds. In round 9, the two sides had to let one team win first and then, in round 10, the two sides had to let the other team win.  Because we had had consistent trusting behavior and they had proven that they could not be fully trusted, we were able to demand that the other team let us win first.  (Which they did.) In the final round of the game, we had complete control and power to allow them to win with us or to have them lose.  (We allowed them to win with us.)

Trust and collaboration, even in extremely tense scenarios, creates winning outcomes.