I am assuming a rational decision maker. In other words, people use their observations, logic, and analysis to arrive at viewpoints and courses of actions.

You seem to be referring to people's viewpoints (on political issues, religious issues, etc.). I agree that those do change everyday but that is not really what I am talking about here.

As a side note, I also think we would disagree on why people's political viewpoints do change. I would say it is in response to external stimuli after an individual analysis. Somebody sees a Muslim suicide bomber and they now support the travel ban; somebody finds out their son is gay and now they support gay marriage, etc. It might be because someone decides to change their mind, but that decision to decide to change is based on an analysis of external factors. You seem to be implying that people just internally decide to change.

But what I have been talking about in this thread is less about viewpoints and more about courses of action. Again, I am assuming that people are rational but this time in more of an economic sense. They want to maximize utility to themselves in the courses of action they take.

To more fully layout the prisoner's dilemma about extreme partisan activity, it seems that people have two choices.

(1) Not engage in extreme partisan activity. This would be cooperation in the game.

(2) Engage in extreme partisan activity. This would be betrayal in the game.

I am assuming that people want to maximize the chances that their political views will be put into place as public policy.

It seems in today's partisan environment, this will have different levels of payoff.

If both sides choose to "cooperate" then a status quo is formed (think politics in the '50s). They will have a chance to pass their policy, but the other side will be there too engaging in legitimate public debate. This is the upper left quadrant in the attached chart (the first chart in the main text).

If one side decides to cooperate, and the other side betray, the betrayal side wins. They crush the competition. I wish this was not true, but it seems that negative attacks works in getting support. These are the upper right quadrant, and the bottom left quadrant.

If both sides decide to defect, then neither side really wins but neither side completely loses and gets eliminated from the political game. This is the bottom right quadrant.

I think the payoffs in today's political structure are those where a something akin to a prisoner's dilemma is formed; the rational response is to "defect" because the expected payout of defecting is higher than the expected payout of cooperating. This is the structural problem that causes people to not change their course of action.

This sucks, but is the situation that I see. You can disagree on whether I am right about the respective payouts. I hope I am.

And again, you misunderstand when I talk about the collective action problem and cooperation. I am in no way making a normative judgement on the benefits of individual liberty vs. collectivization. That is not what I am talking about at all.

Rather, I am talking about the economic collective action problem. This is when the payoff to an individual actor is lower than the payoff to society as a whole. Because of this, this action never happens because it is not rational for an individual to do so.

Applied to the prisoner's dilemma, this means that there is a hidden payoff in the upper right quadrant; society's payoff when both sides cooperate. I think this is huge, but is not taken into account when individuals make their choices. The only normative judgement I am making is that I think the current vicious partisan environment is bad, and I think this is relatively uncontroversial.

Now I know I am making a lot of assumptions here and my explanation probably has some holes. I will try to clarify up to a point, but a message board is not really the best place to explain these concepts.