3. Teach people to care about each other An excellent way to promote cooperation in a society is to teach people to care about the welfare of others.… - Robert Axelrod

The advice in chapter 6 to players of the Prisoner's Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: don't be envious, don't be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don't be too clever. Likewise, the techniques discussed in chapter 7 for promoting cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma might also be useful in promoting cooperation in international politics.
The core of the problem of how to achieve rewards from cooperation is that trial and error in learning is slow and painful. The conditions may all be favorable for long-run developments. but we may not have the time to wait for blind processes to move us slowly toward mutually rewarding strategies based upon reciprocity. Perhaps if we understand the process better, we can use our foresight to speed up the evolution of cooperation.

Once again, there is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. Keeping one's intentions hidden is useful in a zero-sum setting where any inefficiency in the other player's behavior will be to your benefit. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, you benefit from the other player's cooperation. The trick is to encourage that cooperation. A good way to do it is to make it clear that you will reciprocate. Words can help here, but as everyone knows, actions speak louder than words. That is why the easily understood actions of TIT FOR TAT are so effective.

Throughout the social sciences today, the dominant form of modeling is based upon the rational-choice paradigm. Game theory, in particular, is typically based upon the assumption of rational choice. In my view, the reason for the dominance of the rational-choice approach is not that scholars think it is realistic. Nor is game theory used solely because it offers good advice to a decision maker, because its unrealistic assumptions undermine much of its value as a basis for advice.