It’s a tough Easter this year, when we look around at what is happening, a difficult time to rejoice in anything when everything feels broken. How can we recover the sense of hope that Easter time brings to us, no matter what religion we follow: the powerful symbol of the symbolism of Jesus’s death and rebirth.

I have a powerful bit of hope to pass on to all of you, and it has to do with game theory.  Biologists turn to game theory to determine how people react in certain complex social situations. Put people in a tight spot, and see what behavior comes naturally to them.

One of my favorites is something called the Public Goods game. This game is designed to test how people behave when asked to contribute to something that could benefit the entire community, but at a price to themselves.  It’s a bit like asking people to voluntarily pay a tax amount of their own choosing toward maintaining the parks in California.

In this scenario, a number of participants are given tokens as money and allowed to decide secretly how much of it to keep and how much to put into a common pot.  The experimenters then award some percentage of the total in the pot — 40 per cent, say — to everyone playing. If each player is playing with twenty tokens and all four put in all their tokens, the experiments will award 40 per cent of 80, or 32 tokens to each.

The irony of the game is that everyone makes the most money when forfeiting the majority of his own tokens, since the experimenters reward the most from the highest amounts within the pot.

Furious at unfairness

When it’s played as a repeat game, the urge to give is initially enormous — on average, people begin playing by giving up to 40 to 60 per cent of their tokens — but this generous impulse quickly abates so that, by the final rounds, nearly three-quarters of all people contribute nothing and the rest, close to nothing.

Although at first glance, it would appear that people are simply following their own self-interest, that isn’t the explanation offered by the players.  When interviewed later, those participants who had initially been generous grew increasingly furious at freeloaders, who were either contributing nothing or less than the others.

The generous players had retaliated with the only weapon available to them: they’d stop contributing to the public fund.

That’s a bit like what’s happening now.  Fairness is one of the pillars of being human. Our sense of unfairness emerges when two of the most fundamental needs we have — to give generously of ourselves, to take our turn — are thwarted, when the promises we make to each other to take our fair share are broken.

In what we view as our vastly unfair society, in our real-life Public Goods games, we are now all refusing to play.

Infiltrating the game

However, Nicholas Christakis, the Yale University sociologist and network specialist, recently discovered an amazingly hopeful phenomenon in social networks, again using the Public Goods game.

The participants were randomly assigned to a sequence of different groups in order to play a series of games with strangers.  This enabled Christakis to draw up networks of interactions, so that he could explore exactly how the behavior spreads from person to person along the network.

Christakis discovered something amazing and untoward:  giving creates a contagion of giving, a network of “pay-it-forward” altruism.

The actions of participants affected the future interactions of other people along the network.  “If Tom is kind to Harry, Harry will be kind to Susan, Susan will be kind to Jane, and Jane will be kind to Peter,” writes Christakis. “So, Tom's kindness to Harry is seen in Jane's kindness to Peter, even though Jane and Peter had nothing to do with Tom and Harry and never interacted with them.”

All it took was one act of kindness and generosity to spread through multiple periods of play and up to three degrees along the social network.

“Each additional contribution a person made to the public good in the first period of play is tripled over the course of the experiment by other people who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence,” Christakis and Fowler write.

So for every act of kindness or generosity you do for a friend, he or she pays it forward to their friends and their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends.

Christakis proved that kindness and generosity create a cascade of cooperative behavior, even in the most hardened of hearts.

Go out and do something kind for someone else this Easter and watch as your own game turns around and kindness and generosity begin to flow through your social network.

Happy holidays!

I leave you with these beautiful lines by Walt Whitman from Song of the Open Road:

Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?