We Need A Volunteer

Summary

We’ve all been in situations that require a volunteer, someone who will step forward and do the thing no one wants to do so the rest of us can gain. But why would anyone do this?

We Need A Volunteer

The volunteer’s dilemma is a tricky one. In some situations the group needs a willing volunteer for the rest to win, or survive. Take the penguins we talked about in an earlier post. One poor guy has to be the first to jump into the water and check if there’s any seals before the rest can. There’s a high chance that volunteer penguin will get eaten, but if no one volunteers they all go hungry.

Who’d be a volunteer?

If you think back to your school days this dilemma came up quite often. There was always one in the class who’d play a prank on the teacher or steal something, or carry out an act of vandalism. The teacher would say, either the culprit comes forward or you’re all in detention, or something like that. But what if the teacher said ‘If the culprit owns up they get an automatic F in the next exam, but if no one comes forward you all fail it.’? Is the culprit going to stand up? Is someone else going to volunteer and take the fall? Or do you all stay silent? If we look at this logically someone will volunteer, maybe the culprit themselves, or else they along with everyone else fails. They might not want an F but it’s better than a total fail. But does this happen? The fact is, in most cases, no one volunteers. Every person there will be waiting for someone else to stand up and take the F, and so everyone fails.

Can we work together?

If we change the rules of this game slightly and introduce some stakes, we see why no one wants to volunteer. If we took the class of students and told them they could give the teacher a note each stating how many points they would like their grade increasing by. They would get what they wanted if less than 20% of them asked for the maximum of 5 points and the rest kept theirs below that. Who’s going to take the lesser points when someone can get a 5 point increase? If the class worked together they’d realise that they could all increase their score by all keeping their request low. But it rarely works that way. Most would realise that they can get a 5 point lead if they decide to not be one of the students who asks for less than that. The result is, nobody wants to take the lesser score and everyone ends up with nothing.

The games that require a volunteer are played out in our everyday life. The majority of us don’t want to be the one who steps forward and volunteers to do something nobody in the group wants to do, and so we all fail. There’s very rarely a situation where everyone volunteers because most of us are smart enough to understand that we can stand back and not take a hit. But sometimes the volunteer is the smartest guy there, as they understand how to really gain.