It pays to play nice, Harvard study says

[Mugu]

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - Screaming sports coaches and cutthroat tycoons have it wrong: Nice guys do finish first, a new study suggests.

The Harvard University study involved 100 Boston-area college students playing the same game over and over — a punishment-heavy version of the classic one-on-one brinksmanship game of prisoner's dilemma. The research appears in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said study author Martin Nowak. He is director of the evolutionary dynamics lab at Harvard where the study was conducted.

"On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers," Nowak said his experiments found. Those who escalate the conflict very often wound up doomed.


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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080319/ap_on_sc/nice_guys

[Clear Blue Sky]

1. Try testing that in the NFL or NHL...