Lasch, p. 172: “…too much stress on academic competition encouraged individualism at the expense of cooperation.”
Perhaps the world will become more cooperative as feminine value come to the fore. “As compared with men, women are more likely to view themselves as interdependent with others and to be more attuned to relationships and others’ emotions. Generally speaking, men tend to define themselves as more independent and less reliant on others… “Because being moral helps people build and maintain relationships,” Kennedy and her colleagues write, “women are likely to adopt goals and values that promote the welfare of others.” (journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Jessica A. Kennedy (Vanderbilt University), Laura J. Kray (University of California, Berkeley), and Gillian Ku (London Business School), 2017)… The researchers found support for their theorizing in several experiments—at least, under certain conditions.” (Harvard Program on Negotiation, Daily Blog, 01/22/24)
More and more countries are outlawing the death penalty. The world is less dangerous and violent. Get trend charts.
Robert Axelrod and other game theorists following his lead found cooperation evolves naturally even among selfish agents, after repeated interactions eventually build trust.[1] Albeit arising in game theory in the context of a simple two-person, two outcome game, this shift from opportunistic to cooperative engagement is a diametric and discontinuous reorientation. Amatai Etzioni notes that simultaneous selfishness and selflessness have always been operative in human motivation, and has argued for decades that social science simply needs to pay greater heed to selflessness.[2] In game theoretic terms, the hurdle in switching from self-interested short-term behavior to cooperative long-term behavior is lowered by trust building. In the long run, self-interested agents learn that selfishness does not pay and that cooperative behavior establishes trust, ultimately furthering their selfish interests. Emerging information technologies bring transparency, strengthening trust and furthering cooperative behaviors. The loss of privacy thanks to surveillance cameras, DNA testing, and credit card and telephone records certainly make antisocial behavior harder to conceal.[3]
Behavioral biologists find that tit-for-tat reciprocative altruism has evolved throughout the animal kingdom.[4] Once reciprocative altruism reaches a certain population penetration level, under broadly defined conditions, it becomes a stable survival strategy and perpetuates itself. In human society, once the dominant prevailing relational attitude toward engagement with others reorients diametrically from opportunistic to cooperative, this generalized trait becomes a central feature of the societal metamorphosis.
“…security, under law, is boudn up with the existence of force; as law becomes more universally observed, more habitual, the need for force is diminished, though never entirely removed. Disarmament is not a cause of security; quite the contrary, security is the condition of disarmament.” Lewis Mumford, The Aftermath of Utopianism, Christianity and Crisis, Vol 1, No. 4, March 24, 1941.
Washington Post 012024: Cooperation helped by polarization:
The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required cooperation — and identifying the rivals, the competitors for those resources.
“The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred. Which is really sad,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.”
ChatGBT:
Emergent cooperation refers to the spontaneous emergence of cooperative behavior among individuals without the need for external incentives or regulations.
In human society, emergent cooperation can be observed in various contexts, such as in the workplace, social groups, and communities. For instance, employees in a company may work together to achieve a common goal without being explicitly told to do so. Similarly, individuals in a community may come together to solve a problem or address a common issue.
The theory of emergent cooperation is rooted in the idea that humans are social beings who are motivated to cooperate with one another to achieve common goals. This idea is supported by a wealth of research in fields such as psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology.
Overall, emergent cooperation is a relevant and useful theory for understanding human behavior in a variety of social contexts.
[1] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, (New York: Basic Books, 1984)
[2] Amatai Etizioni, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics, (New York: Free Press, 1988)
[3] Richard Thayler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) discuss a range of such mechanisms that can be used to induce cooperative behavior.
[4] Wright, Robert, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, (New York: Random House, 1994)
Privacy is disappearing at multiple levels, thanks to surveillance cameras, phone and credit card records, records of internet shopping, media consumption and website views, and social media records. Putting aside for the moment the issue of who should own and control all this personal data, the mere fact of it’s collection reflects the increasingly public nature of private life. Things we could do anonymously are losing their anonymity. Even if we can protect the privacy social media, shopping and cell phone record data, and deliver full control to individuals, there will still be plenty previously anonymous data now increasingly public, e.g. surveillance camera data, and private data available after court order.
Perhaps this loss of privacy will force us to live more consciously, as though our hitherto private actions will now have to be defended in the light of day as public action. Will this make us more conscious and reduce stealing, cheating and criminal activity? Will it subject previously private habits to social pressure, when we choose to buy from Amazon vs. supporting our local store, owning a share in some nefarious company vs. investing according to ESG principles?
Living more conscious, open and transparent lives may make us easier to trust, and thereby cooperate. Loss of privacy and evolution of cooperation might be tied together.