The tragedy of others

First of all, I finally got it through my thick head that "metacognition" is kind of a hard way to explain something. So, I've retitled a post from a few weeks ago: "Think with the model, Plan with the code" which I think is a lot easier to understand as a programming heuristic.

What follows is very speculative, and I'm not a domain expert in any of the relevant fields, except maybe just being a human being who struggles to not be angry at other humans. The reason I'm posting this is because I think it's relevant to all groups, very much including engineering teams. I've always wondered how there can be so much disagreement in teams that are working towards a common goal, with common tools and assumptions. This is a bit of a hint:

I heard a theory recently that lays out what we might call the "game theory" of being divisive with each other. If you've managed teams, particularly teams spread across distributed areas, you'll notice that "us vs them" style of disagreements are incredibly easy to start, and very hard to eliminate, often to the point of very personal, hurt feelings, people not being able to work together, etc.

Here's the theory that I heard: one of our fundamental strategies as a species is that we are cooperative (and we use stories to coordinate that cooperation). Cooperation has a known problem: free riding. If most of a group is going to expend effort to do something, but one person takes advantage and doesn't expend the effort but does reap the benefit, then you have an immediate incentive to cheat - and if everyone cheats, the whole thing falls apart. So there has to be a very strong mechanism to prevent this.

This mechanism goes by many names: "othering", "in group/out group dynamics", "divisiveness", "politics", etc. We have likely been programmed by our evolutionary and cultural past to be sensitive to someone not fitting into "our" group somehow. Free riders need to hide, so there's probably been a long arms race that has made us all very good at being suspicious of others on weak, and sometimes imaginary signals. We are constantly on hair-trigger to find an "other" group to be distrustful of, to shun, to work against.

There are even studies showing this tendency. Lack of exposure to other groups exacerbates it (there was a study where they randomly separated two groups of Boy Scouts at a camp and they wound up hating each other very quickly, for example).

It's hard not to look out at the world beyond engineering and see this pattern. We all feel very justified in the anger and separation from others that we have - that's the point of this mechanism, once triggered, you have a lot of conviction about the "bad guys", because of that arms race.

I don't have an answer. We are who we are. The only thing we can do is to try to be aware of it. Have compassion for each other. Understand that we all have this mechanism and it's being triggered by distance - ask questions, have conversations, take time, try to find common ground and empathy where you can. It's not always possible of course, and it does "take two to tango", but no one can really get anywhere unless we all try to understand and manage this. It's time to take our cooperation to another level.