Betray or Cooperate

Two suspects are arrested and questioned in separate rooms. If both stay silent, each gets 1 year. If one betrays the other and that other stays silent, the betrayer walks free and the silent one gets 3 years. If both betray, each gets 2 years.

Look at it from one suspect's seat: whatever the other does, betraying always shaves off time. So the cold logic says betray. But if both follow that logic, both serve 2 years instead of the 1 they could have shared.

This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, named by mathematician Albert Tucker in 1950. It captures a strange truth: rational individual choices can add up to a worse result for everyone.