Re:Building Cooperation

This is important work.

As we try to re:place the social, economic, academic, and scientific paradigms we have inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries we need guidance on how to nurture cooperation in doing that work.

We cannot do it alone.

The daunting part is that society seems to be headed in the opposite direction globally: a relentlessly fracturing, fractal process of frightening inertia, creating smaller and smaller subcultures inclined less and less to cooperate. Witness the slow motion dis-integration of the American Republican Party since the rise of the Tea Party group, and now seemingly approaching another singularity energized by the daemon of chaos Donald Trump, and a doomsday cult of Christian nationalists.

Progressives (witness a profoundly intolerant and knee-jerk cult of injury and cancel culture), academics, 'regular folks' ... we are all doing it. Ultra-conservatives are just the most dramatic symptom of a disease of division that is everywhere.

This newsletter is inspired by the March, 2023 article The Secrets of Cooperation .

The article not only describes some of the fundamental dynamics of, and conditions for, human cooperation, it also provides some hints as to how we might further the work of rebuilding broader cooperation.

Norms

One is behavioural norms. We have lost the center here. At least as far back as the rise of Nazism, through Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalinism, Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge, Facebook and Twitter, MAGA Republicanism, to Tim Gurner... The unspeakable has become speakable. And inevitably, doable.

This article reminds us that cooperation requires the efficacy of social norms. How do we get those back? I asked in an earlier piece on my reading of Leo Tolstoy's Confessions, that if we could not agree on everything, could we find where we agreed on anything?

"Is it not possible to ... join together in the one thing needful?" Leo Tolstoy

There will always be those at the outer edges of any community or movement who will not come to the center. But we have to look past the incendiary attention-grabbing - and often violent - absolutists and find that quieter eye in our storms. I believe a kind of 'middle way' possibility exists in most communities and movements. The norms of respect, situational humility, and compassion exist there. We have to shut out the perverted siren songs of rage and intolerance that sound at the fringes, to find the shared norms at the centers.

The Growing Edge

One of the things we know from behavioural science is that the influence of things like the bandwagon effect and social proofing, is powerful.

But this immediately brings up a problem: how do we create the critical mass for those social effects to play their role when the dynamic is one decreasing mass, of atomization, not cohesion? We need, in a sense, critical mass to get critical mass.

"This poses a problem, of course, if most people don’t actually choose a socially desirable behavior, such as installing solar panels. “If you just say that 15 percent do that, you normalize the fact that 85 percent don’t," says [Cristina] Bicchieri [University of Pennsylvania]”

The article here does provide a clue, a tiny sliver of hope: "It turns out that even a minority can nudge people toward a desired behavior if the number is increasing, thus providing a trendy bandwagon to hop on. In one experiment, for example, researchers measured the amount of water volunteers used while brushing their teeth. People who had been told that a small but increasing proportion of people were conserving water used less water than those who heard only that a small proportion conserved."

This suggests that the critical mass conundrum could be addressed by showing directionality and momentum. Can we find evidence that a center is growing? Can we find good news stories of increasing cooperation, collaboration and agreement, anywhere? That there are at least some core norms the majority of people do actually agree with, regardless of those people's socio-political differences?

I believe we can, but this means doing the work. It means digging and sharing and celebrating. It means working hard to recalibrate our biases for the negative and the noisy and the triggering. We have to shut out the noise, and focus on the 'needful' norms that a (hopefully - I have no evidence here) growing number of us seek to return to.

There is hope if we can stay with that work.

Thank you for reading.

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Clemens Rettich

#community #collaboration #cooperation #behaviour #norms #policy #politics #extremism #behavioraleconomics