I’ll be honest here—I’m a sucker for reality tv, particularly the worst kinds. From Keeping Up With the Kardashians to the Bachelor, I watch these shows mainly to take my mind off schoolwork, but I find that IR theory often finds its way into both important real world events and bad reality tv. A spin-off of the Bachelor that I look forward to watching in the summertime is “Bachelor Pad”. It is an elimination style game that features past contestants from the Bachelor and the Bachelorette who then compete for a grand prize of $250,000. What links this show to Neoliberlism, specifically Game Theory/the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the last two contestants must decide whether to keep the $250,000 prize for themselves or share it between the two finalists. The finalists are not allowed to deliberate or talk to each other.

Neoliberal Game Theory originates in the neoliberal analysis of the barriers to international cooperation. Neoliberals understand that a lack of information about one another’s preferences or intentions can lead to a failure of states to cooperate, as well as an incentive for one state to cheat on another. Therefore, Neoliberal scholars often use Game Theory/the Prisoner’s Dilemma to take a closer look at these cooperative barriers. The essence of the Prisoner’s Dilemma reiterates that prisoners are held in police custody and are told that if they can provide evidence against the other prisoner, they will receive a reduced sentence. However, if both prisoners sell the other out, then both will receive longer sentences. The best case scenario for each prisoner is selling the other out while they themselves get away scott-free, but it is safer to cooperate and remain silent, which will grant a short sentence for both.

Bringing it back to the Bachelor Pad, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is well illustrated in this game show. Men and women compete to stay in the game, while also finding love along the way in hopes of coming out of the game with both a money prize and a relationship. The two final contestants are always a male and a female, and by that point in the game, the two finalists are usually in a “show-mance”. At the final stage, the two finalists each have a choice in deciding how the grand prize of $250,000 will be distributed. If contestant A and contestant B both choose to share the money (or stay silent in the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma), then each will receive $125,000. If contestant A chooses to share (or stay silent), and contestant B chooses to keep the money for him/herself (or provide evidence against the other), then contestant B will win all $250,000 and contestant A will receive nothing, and vice versa. If both contestants choose to keep the money for themselves (or both provide evidence against the other), then neither finalist will receive any money and the $250,000 will be distributed between the previously eliminated contestants. In seasons 1 and 2, both finalists saw the benefits in cooperation and trusted each other’s intentions, as the two finalists had better relationships with each other and saw potential in taking the relationship outside of the show. In the third season however, the female contestant decided to share the prize money, while the male decided to keep the money for himself, meaning that he ended up with all $250,000, completely blindsiding the female contestant. The female contestant was furious with the male contestant to say the least, and there was a lot of bleep censoring. The male contestant was quite happy with himself.

In retrospect, the male’s decision to defect can be analyzed from several standpoints. As neoliberals discovered that expectation of future interaction makes actors less likely to defect from cooperate arrangements, the male might have thought that this “show-mance” was short lived and that he did not expect a relationship with the female outside of the show, thus he decided to defect. In terms of Feminist theory, the male contestant’s decision to defect could also be attributed to the socially constructed idea of males being more aggressive and impulsive than females who are seen as more trusting and nurturing. In all, individuals behave similarly to states in terms of evaluating the pros and cons in cooperating by referring to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and shows that Game Theory is quite relevant on both the individual and state level.