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As kids, most of us learned how to play an on-the-fly version of chicken: two players are on a collision course that can be avoided only if one of the parties swerves. The responsible party is branded a “chicken” for demonstrating an aversion to risk, a deficit of courage, a desire to choose compromise over mutually assured destruction. The winner proves the boldest, if most likely to allow hubris to overtake rationality.
As we grow up, the idea of chicken evolves into a game of conflicting goals rather than literal bodies hurtling toward one another, with the loser more often described as the first to “blink.” And these days, the so-called grown-ups may have overdone their…
