Both know how to use the tactics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to get their subjects to squeal. George Stephanopoulos explains it this way:
“He flashes a glimpse of what he knows, shaded in a largely negative light, with the hint of more to come, setting up a series of prisoner’s dilemmas in which each prospective source faces a choice: Do you cooperate and elaborate in return (you hope) for learning more and earning a better portrayal–for your boss and yourself? Or do you call his bluff by walking away in the hope that your reticence will make the final product less authoritative and therefore less damaging? If no one talks, there is no book. But someone–then everyone–always talks.”
And according to Matt Alexander in “How to Break a Terrorist…” the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a still mainstay in the arsenal of methods employed against Al Qaeda.
Nice to know that the story we use to motivate the first game anyone learns in a game theory course might actually be true.
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June 1, 2009 at 4:53 pm
kevindick
Just ordered it on Kindle. Thanks for the recommendation.
June 9, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Fantastic Book on Terrorist Interrogation « The Emergent Fool
[…] 9, 2009 by kevindick Thanks to a pointer from Sandeep Baliga over at Cheap Talk, I recently Kindled Matthew Alexander’s How to Break a […]
July 26, 2009 at 7:59 pm
How to Break a Terrorist, by Matt Alexander « Cheap Talk
[…] 26, 2009 in Uncategorized | by sandeep I already mentioned this book in an earlier post related to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. But that is just one of the techniques suggested by the […]