The Jilted Samaritan

To find yourself jilted is a blow to your pride. Do your best to forget it and if you don’t succeed, at least pretend to. —Molière

Source: Rebcenter-moscow/ Pixabay

You have probably been there. Someone asks for your help, you offer it up, and then this someone says never mind, they found someone else. A similar dynamic plays out in dating.

Person 1 asks Person 2 out on a date; Person 2 agrees, Person 1 informs Person 2 that they found Person 3 to go out with, so the request is withdrawn. Person 2 is left with a sour feeling. No good deed—Thomas Aquinas notwithstanding—goes unpunished.

The incident that gave rise to this post is an experience reported by a professor friend. A journalist requested an interview to receive her input on a piece they were writing. My friend agreed to do the interview and started to prepare. She then received word that the journalist, being under time pressure, had secured input from another academic source. Evidently, the journalist had played the field contacting more than one potential informant, and then went with the first responder. This left the others, and my friend, feeling both used and ignored. I have been in the same situation.

In the offline world, formerly known as the real world and shaped during the Paleolithic, requests for help would be likely delivered face to face, and they would likely be honored. The requester would reap a good and much-needed benefit, and the helper would pay a cost, while also receiving a small psychic benefit from the warm glow of having helped.

In a world of small groups, the two interactants are likely acquainted with each other, and the exchange of request and help would be a building block for a mutually beneficial relationship of reciprocated help. The early anarchists noted this wholesome dynamic (Kropotkin, 1902/2021), and Darwinians later built a theoretical superstructure (Trivers, 1971).

In the online world, the risk of being suckered when trying to help is greater, mainly because requesters can broadcast their call for aid more efficiently and because there is often a large pool of potential helpers. If some of them, the requester may reason, react badly to being spurned, there will be plenty of others to approach in the future.

We may say that the requester is setting up a volunteer’s dilemma, in which they themselves are sure to win (Krueger, 2013a; 2019). The game is effectively played among the would-be volunteers, who may not be aware of each other’s presence. In the standard Volunteer’s Dilemma, VoD, a volunteer is left with a net cost after the warm glow of having helped has faded, which we may denote as a disutility of -1. In this standard game, the volunteer does not care what other players do.

The best outcome, that is, no cost or a (dis)utility of 0, occurs when a player abstains from volunteering while someone else does not. The worst outcome, a disutility of -2, occurs when no one helps. This might be construed as the burden of shared guilt. In the typical notation, the standard VoD is characterized by the inequalities of T > R = S > P, where T refers to unilateral defection, R to mutual volunteering, S to unilateral volunteering, and P to mutual defection.

With the disutilities noted above, a rational and otherwise indifferent player volunteers with a probability of .5, which is obtained as (S-P)/(S+T-R-P). If, however, a player knows they might be suckered if others volunteer too, they might rather dislike mutual volunteering, say with a disutility of -2, remain with a disutility of -1 for unilateral volunteering, and continue to view mutual defection as the worst outcome, say with a disutility of -3.

Interestingly, rational players will still volunteer with a probability of .5, but some of them will experience the pinch of being suckered more acutely. The intuition that this modified VoD of the Jilted Samaritan is less attractive than the standard VoD might eventually be corroborated with empirical data, and if so, the conventional game theorist will be puzzled.

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If players do not take a rational, equilibrium-seeking, approach, they might reason from projection (Krueger, 2013b). In both the standard VoD and the Jilted Samaritan variant, a player who thinks that others will make the same choice, be it volunteering or defecting, with the same probability of say 2/3 as they themselves do, should still prefer volunteering to defecting.

However, and perhaps surprisingly, the ratio of the expected value of volunteering over the expected value of defecting is higher in the jilted game. In spite of the aggravated aversiveness of the prospect of mutual volunteering, projecting players would lean even more towards volunteering than they would in the standard game. This result may not only amaze the game theorist but also the social psychologist. Something else seems to be going on.

Let us return to the scenario that inspired this VoD tutorial. My friend did not know she was in a VoD. She thought she was in a give-help-and-receive-gratitude game, a game with a win-win outcome. Her disappointment was not merely a matter of being spurned but also the result of having learned that she had been placed in a multi-person game without her knowledge or consent. Why do these things continue to happen?

One important reason for (the emergence and) persistence of the Jilted Samaritan game is our post-neolithic mass culture. A seeker—like the journalist in our story—has a pool of potential helpers at hand, or so they think if they fail to realize how rare true expertise is. In the short view, the aid seeker is being rational when setting up the game, and indeed, their hand may be forced by the pressures of their job, by the just-in-time business mentality. In the long view, however, if we consider the possibility of repeated play, the seeker may come to realize that they have exhausted their source pool by squandering the Samaritans’ goodwill.

My advice to help seekers is to not pit helpers against each other if it can at all be avoided. My advice to helpers is to ask if others are being approached as well. Whether such a question is perceived as crass or curt will depend on the context. The question is, I think, legitimate in the context of sharing academic expertise (for free; see Krueger, 2011), whereas it will likely cool the flames of passion in the dating world. The helper finds him- or herself in a trust dilemma (Krueger & Evans, 2013). They ask, can I trust you to ask only me (out)? For more advice, see Molière (epigraph).