Nice guys do not always finish last. In fact, they sometimes finish first. And now we have scientific evidence to prove it, thanks to the work of two Austrian mathematicians who have discovered the value of forgiveness. Or at least they’ve discovered how forgiveness might have come into being in our dog-eat-dog world.
Generosity pays off under conditions of uncertainty. You should not be too tolerant, but not too intolerant, either, says Karl Sigmund, a 47-year-old mathematician at the University of Vienna. Never forget a good turn, but try occasionally to forgive a bad one. We benefit from cultivating a keen sense of gratitude dosed with a small amount of generosity.
The American embassy, bristling with listening posts, lies outside Sigmund’s office window. Just over the border, warring Serbs and Croats are killing each other to the south, while the former Soviet empire is imploding to the east. No wonder the evolution of cooperation is a hot subject in Vienna, where this past year Sigmund and his former graduate student Martin Nowak codiscovered what one might call the Viennese Golden Mean.
In spite of its happy ending, this story about how nice guys came into existence and survived is fraught with near misses and harrowing escapes. And it turns out that nice guys can’t do it on their own. They need help along the way from some not-so-nice guys, who will then disappear in a final apocalyptic outbreak of good feeling.
I by no means want to give the impression that this tendency toward generous cooperation is the usual thing, says Sigmund, who has wild shocks of hair standing up on top of his head, a bottle-brush mustache, and spectacles. As he maps out the limits of this new theory of forgiveness, he sits under an etching of Captain Nemo steering a submarine 20,000 leagues under the sea. It only works after the cooperators get help from stern retaliators. This is the basic message: To get cooperation you need a police force, but then the police die out. So it’s good to have police but not to be police! If all this sounds strange and confusing, welcome to the bizarre world of the mathematics of forgiveness.
