Why tit for tat is the least of our worries when it comes to pay-back.
What is reciprocity and why should we care?
“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, but if you take my eye, I’ll take both of yours.”(1)
Whenever I think about revenge I recall that famous Chinese warning, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
Sage advice.
I get it.
Revenge won’t just be bad for the person I’m hoping to punish, it’ll also be bad for me. However, it would appear that this ancient wisdom is an understatement of the consequences of embarking on a vengeance quest.
Revenge is a type of reciprocity. The word ‘reciprocity’ is based on a Latin phrase meaning give and take, so, in its simplest form, reciprocity is any back and forth action. It’s give and take between people — you do me a good turn and I’ll try to return the favour. It’s give and take in economics — you give me goods or services, I give you money. There’s even a reciprocal saw.
However, when it comes to negative reciprocity, or pay-back as we like to call it, it’s a horse of a different colour.
Unlike other types of reciprocity, negative reciprocity is not symmetrical. As a 2008 paper by researchers at the University of Chicago put it —
“You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours, but if you take my eye, I’ll take both of yours.’’ (1)
If you don’t believe me, let me introduce you to Medea.
In 431B.C.E. Euripides’ play, Medea, was first presented to Greek audiences. The plot of Medea would give any modern soap opera a run for its money.
In brief, the protagonist, Medea, is very annoyed that her husband — Jason — has decided to get himself a new wife. Not a woman to take slights lightly Medea decides Jason must suffer as well.
So far, so ordinary.
To make Jason suffer, Medea begins by killing his new bride with a poison dress and coronet. Most of us would think that was sufficient punishment, but somehow that doesn’t quite hit the mark for Medea.
Medea knows her ex and she knows that though he’ll be sad at the death of his new wife, he won’t be sad enough. So, in order to deal Jason the deepest wound possible, Medea decides to murder their children.
Medea doesn’t hate her children. In fact, like Jason, Medea loves her children dearly. She fully realises how sad the death of her children will make her feel. Which is how she also knows that the childrens’ deaths will destroy Jason.
“Jason: Thou too hast grief. Thy pain is fierce as mine.
Medea: I love the pain, so thou shalt laugh no more.”
Medea hits her target. She destroys Jason, and even though she too suffers she considers it a price worth paying.
Luckily, most of us are not as driven by revenge as Medea. However, if we are honest, most of us also understand revenge. We understand it because revenge is a type of reciprocity and we humans seem to instinctively gravitate towards some variation of reciprocity in all that we do.
Just ask a baby…
Psychologists Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale have discovered that babies as young as 6 months have an innate understanding of reciprocity. (2)
In one of their experiments, Wynn and Bloom show babies a ‘play’ in which geometrical objects, manipulated like puppets, act out a story. In this story a blue circle is trying to climb a hill. Along comes a yellow square who helps the circle up the hill; then a red triangle arrives and pushes the circle down the hill.
After showing the babies the scene, the experimenters place the ‘helper’ and the ‘hinderer’ shapes on a tray and bring them to the children. The results consistently show that even 6 month-old infants overwhelmingly prefer the helpful shape.
In various iterations of the experiment, the researchers changed the shapes and colours of the helper and hinderer and still the results were the same — babies prefer the goodie.
Also, in subsequent variations of the experiment, though not as vengeful as Medea, it seems that babies also prefer to see the ‘baddie’ punished. All of which suggests that we have a naturally occurring, inbuilt sense of reciprocity.
Reciprocity in society and nature
We wouldn’t need to bother with any of this if we were completely independent and didn’t need, or want, to associate with other people. But that’s not the case. This means that having a selfish approach to organising how we live is basically not effective because it ignores the reality of how human societies actually work.
Life can be dangerous, and regardless of whether the danger we face comes in the form of climate change, disease, economic collapse, or some other unforeseen calamity, we need to find ways to work together. Even if we don’t care about our fellow humans, self-interest dictates that we build our systems to reflect the reality of our human social systems.
Our boundaries and fences and walls and insistence on just looking after ourselves and to hell with everyone else, are about as useful as chalk lines drawn on the floor by feuding siblings sharing a bedroom. If we want to be safe, then we need to learn to get along, and understanding and harnessing reciprocity may well be key to this.
Biologists and other scientists are now suggesting that mutual aid and cooperation have supported the survival of many species, including human beings, at least as much as competition. From trees that host fungi to supply them with nitrogen, to plover birds in the mouths of crocodiles cleaning their teeth, nature abounds with examples of reciprocity in action. Even ancient commentators like Cicero thought that human beings had much to learn from the natural world in terms of coexistence.
As Joshua Greene says in his book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.
“Cooperation evolves, not because it’s ‘nice’ but because it confers a survival advantage.”(3)
The key to living side by side in relative and sustainable harmony is cooperation. However, cooperation requires specific conditions if it is to take root. The most essential of all of these conditions is trust.
Lack of trust and breaches of trust are necessarily deal breakers when it comes to willingness to cooperate. Trust needs to be built and trust needs to be maintained if a cooperative process is to be sustained. To express it in the most general of terms I think it might look something like this — Reciprocity (A) + Communication (B) = Trust (C) which in turn fosters Cooperation (D).
However, reciprocity is a bit like electricity (or other natural forces)— in order to correctly leverage its power, we first need to understand it.
It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that electricity moved from being a curiosity to become a tool to be used in our societies. This doesn’t mean that electricity was invented in the late nineteenth century, it simply means we learned how to use it then. Once we figured out how to harness its power, electricity revolutionised human society.
Similar to electricity, if we apply ourselves to the study of reciprocity we can work out what we need to avoid in order to keep ourselves safe, and also how we can use its power to our advantage. Maybe the harnessing of this naturally occurring force of (human) nature might result in the biggest social transformation ever seen — a safe, connected, supportive, cooperating world. At the very least learning about reciprocity might make us all safer, so surely it’d be time well spent.
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(1) Reciprocity Is Not Give and Take — Asymmetric Reciprocity to Positive and Negative Acts (Boaz Keysar, Benjamin A. Converse, Jiunwen Wang, and Nicholas Epley) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.527.3986&rep=rep1&type=pdf
(2) The Moral Life of Babies — https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html
(3) Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Atlantic Books (5 Mar. 2015)
Medea about to Kill her Children, Eugène Delacroix, 1838
