Interesting piece in TODAY.
The unselfish gene
Carrots and sticks do not work to motivate people - we are better off tapping our collaborative instincts
by Yochai Benkler
04:45 AM Jul 23, 2011 (with thanks to
TODAY)
In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene: "If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish."
By 2006, the tide had started to turn. Harvard University mathematical biologist Martin Nowak could declare in Science magazine: "Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world.
"Thus, we might add 'natural cooperation' as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and natural selection."
Why is this deep-rooted belief about human selfishness beginning to change?
To some extent, the answer is specific to evolutionary biology. But similar ideas challenging the notion that people are born selfish have surfaced in several other fields, such as psychology, sociology, political science and experimental economics. Together, these ideas are tracing a new intellectual arc in the disciplines concerned with human action and motivation.
Until the late '80s, our understanding of what made people tick was marked by the rise of an ever more precisely defined model of self-interested rationality - the rational actor theory - which provided the basis for thinking about human behaviour, institutions and organisations.
Assuming that we are uniformly rational and concerned only with advancing our material interests provided good enough predictions about our behaviour - or so we thought - and convinced us that we are best off designing systems as though we are selfish creatures.
Overcoming our assumptions about self-interest is critical to diagnose the risks that new business rivals pose. In 1999, two experts showed how Microsoft's entry into the encyclopaedia market with Encarta symbolised the transformation made possible by networked information economics. Here was a major player leveraging a powerful position to bundle a product and distribute it widely at a low cost.
WHAT WIKIPEDIA TEACHES US
Britannica's lumbering 32-volume, multi-thousand-dollar offering did not stand a chance. Ten years later, Britannica had been pushed to a different model - but not by Encarta. Microsoft stopped producing Encarta in 2009 because of competition from a business model that is inconceivable according to the belief in self-interested rationality: Wikipedia.
If you feel that Wikipedia is unique, ask Zagat's how the user-generated Yelp has affected its market or Fodor what it thinks about TripAdvisor.
Companies such as Google, Facebook and Craigslist have also found ways to become profitable by engaging people.
The way these organisations work flies in the face of the assumption that human beings are selfish creatures. For decades, economists, legislators, executives and engineers have built systems and organisations around rewards and punishments to get people to achieve goals.
Yet, all around us, we see people cooperating and doing the right thing. The adoption of cooperative systems in many fields has been paralleled by a renewed interest in the mechanics of cooperation among researchers in the social and behavioural sciences.
Through the work of many scientists, we have begun to see evidence across several disciplines that people are in fact more cooperative and selfless than we assumed. That is perhaps why using carrots and sticks to motivate people is not effective.
We need systems that rely on engagement and a sense of common purpose.
Most organisations would be better off helping us to engage and embrace our collaborative, generous sentiments than assuming that we are driven purely by self-interest - building efficient systems by relying on our better selves rather than optimising for our worst.
THE SCIENCE OF COOPERATION
What might account for human cooperation? The first generation of explanations in evolutionary biology began with the theory of kin selection, which predicts that human beings will incur costs only to save others who carry their genes. That explained the cooperative behaviour in ant and bee colonies as well as in smaller family groups.
From there, it was a small hop to accepting reciprocity between individuals not genetically related as an important source of cooperation: "I'll scratch your back if you immediately scratch mine."
Over the years, researchers have developed models of indirect reciprocity, networked reciprocity and even group selection to explain observations of looser and more remote cooperation. The findings in biology meet human society directly in the work on gene-culture coevolution of anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. They have been gathering evidence for the proposition that cultural practices, too, are subject to evolutionary pressures and that human individuals and cultures evolve towards more-successful strategies.
Imagine two groups. In one, the practice of serving in the army is valued; in the other, it is not. In the first group, people are willing to fight and risk their lives for their group or donate special skills such as weapon-making or intelligence gathering. In the second, they aren't.
If these two groups go to war, the outcome will never be in doubt. And populations do not have to wait until genetic changes disperse these traits; they can copy one another's best practices if they seem to work better. Mr Boyd and Mr Richerson argue that cultures evolve not only through the copying of practices but also through genetic changes; in other words, genes and cultures coevolve.
Cultural practices can influence the genetic development of populations that adopt them, favouring genetic predispositions that benefit most from the cultural practice or make following it easier. The biology of cooperation draws our attention because it speaks with the authority of the most reliable way we know how to know: Science.
If we simply say the word empathy, it sounds mushy. But if a scientist like Tania Singer shows, using fMRI scans, that women's brains light up in three places when they get electric shocks, and that when their partners are shocked, their brains light up in two of the same three places, we understand empathy not as a hard-to-define feeling but as something that people experience in a physical sense.
Neuroscience also shows that a reward circuit is triggered in our brains when we cooperate with one another, and that provides a scientific basis for saying that at least some people want to cooperate, given a choice, because it feels good.
We are far from having a clear model that connects all these dots; what I offer is conjecture based on research that has not made the leap to claim those connections. However, the argument is suggestive; it gives us a framework to grapple with the idea that many of us are, by a combination of nature, nurture and the interactions between us, much better and less selfish than our standard models predict. © 2011 Harvard Business Publishing (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)
Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He is the author of The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest.
Some levers to build cooperation
FAIRNESS AND MORALITY People care about being treated fairly. According to work conducted by Mr Ernst Fehr and his collaborators, "fair" does not mean "equal".
In experiments where some people gained because of skill or luck, the others initially were willing to let them walk away with a much larger share of the gains.
To some extent, people care about having a fair share of whatever benefits their cooperation produces. If some players deviate too far from the equal distribution norm, the others will punish them even if by doing so they lose, too.
In fact, most people prefer to lose everything than to walk away with too small a share of the gains. People also care about doing the right thing. Clearly defined values are crucial to cooperation; explaining and reinforcing the ethical thing to do will increase the degree to which people behave that way.
REWARDS AND PUNISHMENT
In order to foster cooperation, it is critical to set up systems that appeal to participants' intrinsic motivations - that is, what they want to do from within - instead of systems based on monitoring people and rewarding or punishing them according to their behaviour.
There is a consistent and stable body of work that tells us that if we add money, things may go worse rather than better. That is, monetary incentives and material rewards can crowd out intrinsic motivations to cooperate or display empathetic behaviour.
For example, a recent study in Sweden, which has a purely voluntary blood donation system, showed that women's contributions decreased when they were offered payments.
Donating blood is a way for people to signal that they are the kind willing to sacrifice for the good of others; offering money spoiled that effect.
We should not try to motivate people only by offering them material payoffs. We should also focus on motivating them socially and intellectually by making cooperation social, autonomous, rewarding and even fun.
REPUTATION AND RECIPROCITY
One extremely important form of cooperation hinges on long-term reciprocity.
Systems that rely on reciprocity are enormously valuable but easily corrupted. Reputation is the most powerful tool against this. As online systems such as eBay have shown, even anonymous reputation systems are sufficient to keep people in line.
DIVERSITY
Systems that harness diverse motivations are more productive than those built for people who care only about material payoffs. Because we differ from one another, cooperative systems have to be flexible.
They also need to recognise that we are sensitive to the costs of cooperating, but the degree of sensitivity can change. It is possible to create a system that depends on massive self-sacrifice, but it is extremely tough to sustain it.
http://www.todayonline.com/Commentary/EDC110723-0000016/The-unselfish-gene
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