by Man and woman holding hands up close. Credit – Kelvin Murray – Getty Images
AConflict seems to be all around us. The Global Conflict Tracker lists 27 conflicts around the world today; a sample of 1,490 leaders polled by the World Economic Forum said the biggest societal risk this year was polarization; and Taylor Swift has even been targeted for fear that she will endorse President Biden and dominate the 2024 election. Why can’t we all be the same?
Surprisingly, we do. The scale and range of our collaborations are almost human-like and conflict of all kinds is less frequent and less devastating than in the past. We accept it but we must be surprised that people from different parts of the world are able to live, work, and even commute on tortured trains and planes in peace. A plane full of chimpanzees who didn’t know each other would be a plane full of dead and dying apes, blood and body parts scattered through the aisles, as primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy showed in her famous book, Mothers and Others.
The mechanisms that foster cooperation are now well understood. The most ancient of these is “inclusive well-being,” or cooperation among families and small tribes through shared genes. Continuous cooperation for mutual benefit, or “direct reciprocity,” is the foundation of friendships and networks. This mechanism, too, is ancient and can be found throughout the animal kingdom. Mutual benefit reaches our extended networks through shared reputations and norms—the basis of cooperation among those who share religion, politics, and other group memberships. This is a uniquely human form of cooperation facilitated by our ability to gossip and keep tabs on everyone around us, even strangers.
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But there are always risks of conflict, big and small, breaking out. Fortunately, the science of cooperation shows what it means to have tolerance in friendship and communing. For with them to be true us.
Here are 3 lessons:
1. Competition helps us find mutual benefit
Ultimately, collaboration succeeds when people expect to gain more by working with many others than themselves or in a smaller group – a maxim so ubiquitous across all walks of life that I call it the “Law of the Cooperation” on him. This does not mean that all groups achieve this optimal scale. When we start a company, form an alliance, or try to make peace with an enemy, we do not always know in advance the reward, whether the other party will do their part, or whether they will be equal to the reward to share. . Cooperation depends not only on actual rewards, but on people’s expectations. So many groups are trapped by historical grievances, false beliefs about the other side, or what can be achieved by working together. Competition is what breaks us out of these sub-optimal traps.
In the 11th century, most trade was facilitated by locals or based on trust through family ties. But an experiment emerged from the competition. Groups like the Maghribi Jewish Traders tried to create mechanisms for reputation sharing and informal community enforcement. Their experiment succeeded in extending cooperation to an expanding network of trust and trade beyond family ties with those across the Mediterranean, from Spain to Sicily to Egypt and Palestine.
Perceived mutual benefit is why trade between two countries reduces the likelihood of war. You don’t want to fight your factory, unless you have another factory. Similarly, the sharing of knowledge allowed for cooperation during the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization led to large factories, the expansion of education to create a workforce for those factories, and skilled workers who formed alliances and companies to compete for the spoils and took advantage of a vast new source of energy in the form of fossil fuels.
2. Cooperation undermines cooperation
Corruption and civil conflict are often thought of as puzzles but they are less elusive than well-functioning institutions and peace. Corruption is often the oldest and most stable form of cooperation—the ties that bind us to family, friends, and networks—relabeled as nepotism and cronyism. My colleagues and I have shown experimentally how the possibility of “direct reciprocity”—bribery in effect—undermines well-functioning institutions and how cultural exposure to bribery can increase its prevalence. In the West, these are often lobbyists, special interest groups, and revolving doors. The most effective anti-corruption strategies are those that undermine these cooperation mechanisms—such as preventing revolving doors and creating cooling off periods—to undermine alliances and prevent people from cooperating to undermine the system.
In The WEIRDest people in the world, Joseph Henrich argues that the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage and other reforms to European family practices beginning in the 4th century undermined European tribes and created the modern nuclear family. This in turn reduced nepotism and set the stage for more successful non-family corporations and liberal democracies in Europe. The values that create that change, such as individualism, are spreading around the world through education, urbanization, and jobs that take people away from their families.
3. Perceptions can create reality
The US economy is currently booming, but the rise in consumer sentiment has slowed. The perception that the standard of living has declined – unsurprisingly due to high interest rates and price increases on a range of goods, from essential goods and services to homes – has fueled perceptions of zero sum. Our zero-sum psychology leads us to believe that there is not enough for everyone. This leads people to rely more on their immediate networks at the expense of others, which increases political divisions. Regardless of reality, even the perception of zero-sum conditions can create that zero-sum reality because people choose not to work with each other.
Good-intentioned efforts can help us overcome past injustices or make amends to share more by reinforcing subgroups at the expense of a larger group. The ethnic and racial boxes we check for college applications, scholarships, and jobs repeat categories like African American, Asian American, Latino, and white. These categories are options. They cover other possible assent groups. Does a child of wealthy non-white immigrants, such as former Harvard president Claudine Gay, the daughter of wealthy Haitian immigrants, have more in common with Black Walmart workers who might tick the same box than their wealthy White counterparts ? Is focusing on ancestry and ignoring other forms of privilege the best way to close racial wealth gaps?
Evolutionary theory and experimental evidence show that race is not a natural category. We emerged alongside people who looked like us. And the social categories we create and revise affect perceptions of who one is with them and and who he is us. When this is combined with zero-sum perceptions, this is a recipe for polarization and conflict.
The science of collaboration shows that we can engage, but it’s easy to retreat into conflict. The danger today is that because the scale of cooperation is now in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, the consequences of potential conflict are greater than ever before. By revealing the wins through working together for mutual benefit, by removing subgroup differences rather than reinforcing them, and by talking to each other across our divides, we remind ourselves of what we share and what we can achieve by working together together.
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