The Thud Experiment

American pych takes a hit.psychiatry and the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behavior filtered into economic thought.These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents, but when RAND's analysts tried the games on their own secretaries, they instead chose not to betray each other, but to cooperate every time. This did not, in the eyes of the analysts, discredit the models, but instead proved that the secretaries were unfit subjects.