Why I Believe in Karma

Let me share the evidence

I’ve grown reluctant to use the K word—because it’s so easily misunderstood.

As soon as people hear me say karma, they think I’m spouting off mystical gibberish. I might as well lay out tarot cards or peer into a crystal ball. I’m just a step away from joining a UFO cult.

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It’s true—I have a high tolerance for metaphysics. But when I refer to karma, I’m talking about hardheaded science. I’m drawing on empirical studies and historical evidence.

Yes, I believe karma can be demonstrated via psychology and social science, but also mathematically. It’s almost like Newton’s third law—actions in one direction create responses in the opposite direction—only applied to human behavior. Once you understand how it works, you see it everywhere.

For example, I find validation in the game theory competitions Robert Axelrod conducted in the 1980s. He invited experts to participate in contests based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma—but lasting 200 rounds. In each round, players were forced to choose between cooperation and betrayal.

But here’s the twist. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, cooperation only wins if your adversary also cooperates. You lose if your opponent is willing to betray you. And everybody loses if both parties betray each other.

So what’s the winning strategy?

Participants tested various solutions in these competitions, some of them quite elaborate—drawing on advanced statistical analysis. But the simplest strategy was the winner.

This winning strategy was “tit-for-tat.” You did to others what happened to you in the previous round. If you encountered cooperation, you tried it the next time. But if you got betrayed, you mimicked that behavior in the following round.

It was amazing that a tactic so simple could defeat more sophisticated strategies. It suggested that there was something inherently powerful in reciprocity. Just as the proverb predicts: As you sow, so shall you reap.

This is what we call karma—the tendency of the universe to give you in return what you have given others. But now it was vindicated by game theory.

Temple decoration in Ranakpur, India. The knots depict the interlocking chain of karma.

I studied the results of Axelrod’s tournaments while I was a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. But at that very same moment, a brilliant thinker was reaching a similar conclusion a few hundred yards away inside Stanford’s Department of French and Italian.

His name was René Girard.