For a moment, imagine yourself as an accomplice to a crime.

You and your partner are under arrest, and the police put you in two different rooms for questioning. The rules are simple: if both of you cooperate and tell the truth, you walk free. If you tell the truth but the other doesn’t, you go to jail for 10 years. But if both of you defect and lie, both of you go to jail for 5 years. The catch is you don’t know what the other person will say, and anything you say will either set you free or send you to jail.

What would you do?

Tough choice, I know. And it’s not just tough for you but for most scientists in the world, too. Known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, this problem has been a critical part of game theory, a field that tries to understand why we do what we do and how we can make better decisions in our complex and social world.

To Be or Not to Be:

I first read about the prisoner’s dilemma five years ago and dismissed it as yet another thought experiment. But as I turned from a kid to a young adult, I can see just how important this problem is because even when we’re not facing 10 years of jail time, we have to deal with problems that don’t have any easy solution.

As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet four centuries ago, “To be, or not to be; that is the question.”

Isn’t it crazy? We’ve solved some of the greatest mysteries of the world since then, but Shakespeare’s question still remains unanswered. And today, these questions show up everywhere, for everyone.

Should you tell the teacher that you saw your best friend cheating in an exam, or should you not? Is it better to lose a friend and be called a teacher’s pet, or is it better to keep a friend while knowing they did something wrong?

Should you work at a startup and experience the craziness of a company’s early days (with the risk of suddenly going jobless), or choose a safer job that doesn’t feel as exciting but keeps covering the bills?

Should you try and seek more funding for your company and infuriate your past investors, or fire the employees who’ve given their blood and sweat to keep your dream going?

Should you, as the President of a nation, dismantle nuclear weapons and risk being seen as weak, or build more of them while increasing the risk of an all-out war that wipes out humanity?

How do you choose which way to go when it’s not win-win, win-lose, or lose-win but a smorgasbord of a thousand different outcomes? And when those outcomes range from something as simple as choosing what’s for dinner to something as complicated as the difference between world peace and total annihilation, decision-making feels herculean.

So, what do we do?

Listen to Our Inner Voice:

Here’s why:

We live in a low-trust society. Every day, it’s depleting faster than the oil in Arabia. And that lack of trust is the reason the prisoner’s dilemma gets so challenging.

If Earth was a wonderland, there were no conflicts, and everyone trusted each other, the prisoner’s dilemma would be easy to solve: both of you would tell the truth and walk away freely. But the moment doubt comes in, the problem rushes in like a flood. You could tell the truth, but WHAT IF the other person chose not to? They might go free while you rot in jail. And, if you lie but they tell the truth, you’ll go free. But will you be able to live peacefully if you knew you were the reason they’re behind bars? And if both of you lie, you might not go free, but five years in jail aren’t as bad as ten.

Can you spot the pattern here? As soon as trust goes down, the worst option (both of you go to jail) starts to feel like the best one. Both of you want to go free, but none of you want to spend 10 years in jail and let the other one walk away. So, both of you defect and go to jail.

You know you’re living in a low-trust society when suboptimal choices become the default.

But you don’t have to. Unlike oil, we can renew and rebuild trust, and that begins with ourselves.

How many times in a day do you doubt yourself? I know you don’t have an answer, but think about those little moments when you say to yourself:

–  Am I worth this?

–  Should I go ahead and write to the boss?

–  What if I speak and they think I’m stupid?

–  I don’t know if I’ll ever impress my dad.

–  I’m applying for this job, but how will I do in the interview?

–  I hope my dream school doesn’t think I’m too dumb for them.

When you don’t trust yourself, how will you trust other people? If you shush your inner voice like a toddler but prioritize external opinions like a religious doctrine, will you ever be able to trust yourself?

I know these questions are hard. But what’s harder is trying to solve your prisoner’s dilemma without a clue or any guiding principles. That’s all you end up doing: “trying,” never fully reaching a satisfying solution. You get stuck in the middle and default to that suboptimal choice. 

We need some guiding principles, and the best ones are the values we hold dear. But to let them guide us through our inner voice, we need to build trust from the inside out.

Rebuilding Trust from the Ground Up:

In the 1980s, researchers made computer programs that played with each other in a scenario like the Prisoner’s dilemma. The program could either cooperate or defect based on the guiding principles that the programmer set up and that choice defines whether the program wins or loses after 200 rounds.

Unlike any of the researchers’ expectations, the simplest algorithm won at the end of all the rounds. All it did was tit-for-tat. It would start with cooperating, but if the other defected, it would defect in the next round. If the other cooperated that time, this algorithm would be back to cooperating.

Pretty simple but unexpectedly effective! The lesson is simple: we must cooperate, be kind, and be forgiving without letting the other side walk over us and take advantage. Live and let live.

That’s what a trustworthy society does! It lives and lets others live, too. Let yourself live by your principles and values. And while you’re at it, put integrity at the top. That’s because you can build trust only when you have proof of trustworthiness.

Let’s go back to the prisoner’s dilemma where both of you make the best choice and admit the truth—setting everyone free. Now you know that the other person trusted in you, you trusted in them, and both of you avoided prison. There’s proof of trust. With that in place, who are you most likely to commit a crime with next? A total stranger or the one who saved you from a ten-year sentence?

Of course, you’ll trust your current partner. I know the example is a bit strange, but that’s how we build trust in all our relationships whether it’s at work, at home, or even with ourselves.

Before you can begin trusting yourself, you need to build proof of trustworthiness. The best and fastest way to do that is by making promises and keeping them (aka acting with integrity).

Begin with the small tasks. Choose something that you know you can easily accomplish, such as cleaning your room. Make a promise to yourself: “I’ll clean my room today at 6 PM.,” and then follow through at that time.

Make and keep promises every day. Build up as much proof of trustworthiness as you can and increase the intensity of those promises gradually. After 30 days, try something a bit more challenging, like waking up one hour early for the next month. After a year of building your integrity, you’ll become a master decision-maker.

You’ll have more than enough proof to trust yourself, choose the best option (for you and others) in complicated problems, and push back when you see things going south.

Whenever those tough situations come in, you’ll be able to seek guidance from yourself, and that is powerful. Instead of letting doubt and fear lead you to suboptimal outcomes, you’ll let your principles guide you to the best choice for yourself and others.

I cannot solve the prisoner’s dilemma or any of your problems for you. No one can—except you. Every problem and challenge in your life will be different from the one before, but one thing will remain constant: YOU. When that constant is stable, trustworthy, and principled, solving problems shifts from your worst nightmare to a new opportunity to put your creative thinking skills to work.

Finally, I think we have an answer to Shakespeare’s question, “To be or not to be?”

I’d say, “Be…within and you shall know the answer every time, everywhere.”