Christmas cards and the Prisoner's Dilemma

It is early January 2013 and as we approach the twelfth night of Christmas thoughts turn to dismantling the decorations.  Generally this is a dismal ritual that truly heralds deepest, dankest winter in the U.K. but this year something caught my attention as I was taking down our display of Christmas cards.

My wife and I sent and received the usual round of Christmas cards to friends and neighbours.  My general instinct is that such cards are wasteful and I would be a better, greener person if I did not send them, but my wife has taught me that they are useful tokens of social esteem and connectedness.  She is, of course, correct.  The point here is that I have a history of not sending them for a number of years; right up until my wife and I got together in fact.

Since I have begun sending such cards I have noted my own tracking behaviour.  I decide whether or not to send a card based on whether or not I have received one myself in previous years.  This decision includes paper cards and electronic messages too.  In general if I have not I do not send one.  However, I do quickly revisit recent history in order to find reasonable cause for not having received one - was so and so ill, were they burgled last December etc.?

Once I have sent out the cards I then track the incoming 'response' cards, and if I do not receive a response before 25 December I become mildly socially anxious and try to assess whether I have insulted this person during the year, or if the card I sent was in some way too atheistic for their taste and so on.

This is all fairly innocuous but it also clearly conforms to a tit-for-tat kind of reciprocity that one would expect in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game.  The first player sends a card (which I construe as cooperative) and I reciprocate with the same move.  If the first player does not, then I too defect.  Of course, the cooperation here is not substantive, and it really operates as a social maintenance signal - something along the lines of "you're still in my gang" followed by "and you're in mine."  To this end it is more a statement of future intent to cooperate and maintain a social unity.  This is something we do in many other ways throughout the year, but I suspect there is something important about the marginally more costly signal of buying, writing and posting a card.  (As an aside, I wonder whether the recent large increases in cost for postage in the U.K. have had an effect on social networks?  And electronic cards are probably judged to be less of a commitment.)  I also suspect that my calculations around reasons for not having received a card are more generous to those with whom I have had significant social interactions in recent times.  Those folk I rarely see might not be judged as flexibly, or as exhaustively.

Related to this last comment is another function of card giving.  Christmas cards might be a way back into a social arrangement.  As I said, I have a history of total defection from this game, but since I have started sending cards I am receiving more, and there are some commensurate changes in my social life as a result.  Most notable is the greater sense of connection I have to the neighbours in my street, and that has proved useful on occasion - especially when we were burgled last year (before Easter, when we don't send cards).  So, where the tit-for-tat strategy is seen as punitive it should also be seen as beneficent.  Restarting the game with a card encourages reciprocity and begins the work of re-growing ties.  But there will be clear cognitive limits to this - I need to be remembered by the person I am sending a card to.

The memory issue got me thinking about the other Christmas card issue - round robin letters that detail the comings and goings of an entire family or just one person, more often than not in positive tone.  They are traditionally inserted into a Christmas card.  It is possible that such letters are designed to remind you of who the sender is and perhaps their value to you as a member of your social group.  But it is often the case that recipients find them annoying.  They sail close to bragging in some cases and where they do the honesty of the signal is doubtful, or worse a clear intent to indicate social superiority is inferred.  I wonder if round robin letters are rigorously judged, and where they are found boastful whether this leads to a card the next year or not?

Upon a little investigation I have also discovered that some people keep a note of cards sent and received - a sort of social ledger to help them keep track of their network and its defectors.  I did ask one why they did this and the response was "out of interest, I just want to know, but I will send everyone on my list a card next year even if they did not this."  This raises a few questions.  What did they want to know for?  Will this information be used in other circumstances?  Will it affect the quality of the card sent next year?  Does this person only send cards to a core social group or to the entire Dunbar set?  And, for how many years will this be tolerated before cards are not sent?

As the distribution of Christmas card labour is unequal in our household I might next reflect on producer-scrounger dynamics with relation to maintaining social capital through successful marriage...