Fostering cooperation in an uncooperative world
People don’t hold doors open anymore. You just can’t seem to get along with your roommate. Even the U.S government has been shut down for a month. Is the world just an uncooperative place?
If you ask an economist, they’ll tell you that the fundamental problem with cooperation is that the incentives have to align with the expected behavior. While cooperation leads to the best outcome for the group, it may not always lead to the best outcome for the individual. In class, we learned about game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma: if both parties cooperate then both will benefit, otherwise, if only one party cooperates then they have to pay a cost while the other party benefits.
A recent study published in the Nature of Human Behavior sought to answer the question: how can you promote cooperation in an uncooperative society? Through mathematical analysis, simulations and examples from real-world social networks, the researchers found that the key to cultivating cooperation lies in the creation of sparse connections — similar to bridges and brokers — between disparate groups. [1] The researchers use evolutionary graph theory, a new branch of mathematics where it is possible to study “biological and social evolutionary dynamics on networks” [2] and to examine faltering cooperation in large population networks.
The paper describes a real-life example of a fourth-grade class, a community comprised of 25 students and that was further divided into two sub-communities. It is common to see uncooperative behavior within sub-communities, as it helps to reinforce the “us” versus “them” nature of groups, and maintain the dominance of the sub-group [3]. However, the study found that the class mainly showed cooperative behaviors, even between the sub-communities. This can be attributed to the links in between groups: the connections of the bridges and brokers who promote cooperation and mutual benefits.
This relates to the concept of strong and weak ties, where weak ties contribute the most benefit to an individual, as they provide new information and varying insights. This information can take the form of connecting to new jobs, and in this case, can helping in aligning incentives between sub-communities. In the fourth-grade classroom, local bridges promoted cooperation by providing information about the other sub-group; lowering the threshold for collaboration and making it easier to see the commonalities between the two groups.
Fostering cooperation is not easy, especially in a world where we’re incentivized to only think about ourselves. However, encouraging connections between segregated groups; humanizing the other side and cultivating weak ties can help in building a cooperative society.
Main article:
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0368-6
Other References:
[3] https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html
