It can be useful when teaching the RoUCa grid to people to point out their behaviours as they react to learning it.
Quite often I’m asked “how do you know that?”, to which my answer is usually “how don’t you know that?”.
We all vary in our ability to render and respond to the environment. This gives us our different personalities, but personalities are just as much about what we can’t do as about what we can.
This is particularly apparent when explaining the concept of the Wiper.
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The Wiper acts as a low-pass filter attenuating the signal passed from U to the Cognitive sector.
The narrower the Wiper the lower the frequencies that are allowed to pass through.
An Individual might derive a quite high-resolution U, but if they have a narrow Wiper these frequencies (in the model) are screened out and unavailable to the Cognitive sector.
The more open the Wiper the more higher frequencies can be passed to the Cognitive sector without being screened out.
An Individual with a narrow Wiper may be prone to enacting less appropriate behaviours as they are unable to deemed them as unfeasible. Likewise, an Individual with an open Wiper may miss out on opportunities as they over analyse their environment.
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Behaviourally the Wiper can be thought of as an Individual’s capacity to sustain cooperation.
People are often forced to collaborate through Nash’s Trap; if they were to purse another course of action they would be worse off.
Cooperation requires something else; trust.
Successful cooperation requires one Individual to trust another Individual with their resources. This trusted Individual could receive an immediate pay-off by defecting now in lieu of a greater payoff later.
Individuals that can sustain cooperation are able to leverage their mutual gains over the environment.
This instigates a positive feedback process where trust is given over an ever-increasing initial stake of resources to receive an ever-increasing future pay-off – until it doesn’t.
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We all have a cheating point.
At some point an Individual will break the cooperative relationship to take the resource that they have been trusted with.
This is probably the point that upsets people most when investigating personality.
People cheat.
I can’t help that. You only have to turn on the news or pick up a paper to see evidence of this. Yes, the world would be a better place if people cooperated with each other but like the fable of the frog and the scorpion some just don’t have the capacity to be able to.
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The Wiper in some ways reflects our social capacity. The narrower the Wiper the less likely an Individual is able to sustain cooperation.
This leaves their counterparty with a dilemma. Although they would like to be able to cooperate as this is more likely to generate better returns over the environment than a collaboration, it makes no sense to do so if the person they are looking to work with will consistently defect and take their staking resource.
Expecting a narrow-Wipered Individual to cooperate is pointless as the information needed to make this action feasible has been screened out.
Effectively they are lacking empathy.
This can be confusing for those with open-Wipers who like to think that if they could just make another accommodation for their counterparty or mitigation for some past event that they might be able to instigate a beneficial reciprocal relationship.
Unfortunately, this rarely happens.
Givers have to learn when to stop giving because takers never know when to stop taking.
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