Driving With Your Cell Phone Is Like Selling Sex

I was driving yesterday, and came to a stop sign. Three cars, including mine, approached the intersection at roughly the same time from three different directions. I arrived second. I and the driver who arrived third waited for the driver who arrived first to go through the intersection. And waited. The first driver was talking on his cell phone, looking back and forth at myself and the other driver, and not moving. Eventually I got tired of waiting and put my car in gear, starting through the intersection. The first driver, still on his cell phone, decided to proceed at that point, cutting me off.

I made a post recently in which I talked about the Prisoner's Dilemma game in relation to strippers who sell sexual services. The Prisoner's Dilemma game represents any situation where people need to cooperate in order to protect some resource or to create something good, but it is to the advantage of each individual to cheat and not cooperate. It's widely understood that talking on a cell phone while driving makes driving less safe, not just for yourself but also for the people you could potentially have an accident with. But a lot of people talk on the cell phone while driving anyway, relying on other drivers who aren't using cell phones to compensate for the cell phone user's mistakes. As an example, the driver I encountered yesterday relied on me to brake and avoid hitting him when he drove into the intersection after I was already in it. In the language of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, he was counting on me to cooperate while he cheated.

The truth is that I also sometimes "cheat" in Prisoner's Dilemma situations. Drivers cooperate to keep the roads safe by driving safely and respecting traffic laws, but sometimes when I'm in a hurry my driving becomes less safe. I may cut in front of people and force them to brake, or I may rush through a stop sign. I try not to do this, but sometimes the short term, personal advantage dominates my thinking. And of course, the more I drive that way, the more likely I am to have an accident, even though the odds of having an accident each time I cheat are low.

We all think of ourselves as cooperators, but most of us cheat from time to time. People vary in the amount of cheating they do. Some people have specific areas of their lives where they never cheat; for example, I don't cheat on my taxes, although I sometimes pay them late. But as with my occasional unsafe driving, it's rare that someone never cheats. We almost always have some area in our lives where we don't think it's that important. Someone who never cheated would probably be considered obsessive.

As I mentioned in the previous post, strippers need a business that is licensed as a strip club in order to work. Most strippers cooperate to protect the strip club license. Those that don't cooperate may have one of several reasons. First, they may not expect to work at the club very long. In that case, selling sexual services in addition to stripping maximizes their short term income in a situation where the long term doesn't exist.

Something similar may happen if stripping is a part time job. A part time stripper may not value her job if she has another source of income, or she may feel that a second, part time job isn't worth while unless she can increase her earnings through prostitution.

If a stripper is bad at her job, she may need to sell sexual services in order to make stripping worth while. Or she may feel entitled to sell sexual services as a way to make up the income difference between herself and more capable strippers.

She may believe that all strippers sell sexual services.

It may have occurred to her that one stripper selling sexual services one time doesn't pose much risk to a strip club, but it may not have occurred to her that one or more strippers doing it regularly increase the risk a lot. So she may feel that she's not harming anyone.

She may be a prostitute who finds a strip club convenient for getting business.

And there are probably reasons I haven't thought of.

We all use this type of reasoning when we cheat. We do things in short term situations that we wouldn't do if we had to live with the consequences over the long term. Those of us who have worked two jobs know that we tend to make demands of our second job that we wouldn't make of our first job. Cheating is more likely to occur among people who are poor students than people who are good students, poor athletes are more likely to cheat than good ones, and so on in any situation where people can be ranked according to how well they perform.

In some cases, the decisions of strippers who sell sexual services may be perfectly rational. In other cases, they may be rational only from a short term view point, but we all sometimes fail to take the long term into account. In any case, the thought processes that lead them to sell sexual services are the same processes that we all use in various areas of our daily lives. Stripper/prostitutes are engaging in ordinary, human thinking. This ordinary thinking leads them to sell sexual services, just as it sometimes leads me to drive too fast. For most of us, having safe roads is much more important that regulating the behavior of strippers in strip clubs. Using the same logic as stripper/prostitutes, we do things that are a risk to ourselves and others.

And we wouldn't be human if we didn't judge stripper/prostitutes for taking foolish risks.