Meeting at Grand Central

Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation

Lee Cronk, Beth L. Leech

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691166599, 9780691154954
• eBook ISBN: 9781400845484
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

A revolutionary approach to the study of cooperation that unites evolutionary biology and the social sciences

From the family to the workplace to the marketplace, every facet of our lives is shaped by cooperative interactions. Yet everywhere we look, we are confronted by proof of how difficult cooperation can be—snarled traffic, polarized politics, overexploited resources, social problems that go ignored. The benefits to oneself of a free ride on the efforts of others mean that collective goals often are not met. But compared to most other species, people actually cooperate a great deal. Why is this?

Meeting at Grand Central brings together insights from evolutionary biology, political science, economics, anthropology, and other fields to explain how the interactions between our evolved selves and the institutional structures we have created make cooperation possible. The book begins with a look at the ideas of Mancur Olson and George Williams, who shifted the question of why cooperation happens from an emphasis on group benefits to individual costs. It then explores how these ideas have influenced our thinking about cooperation, coordination, and collective action. The book persuasively argues that cooperation and its failures are best explained by evolutionary and social theories working together. Selection sometimes favors cooperative tendencies, while institutions, norms, and incentives encourage and make possible actual cooperation.

Meeting at Grand Central will inspire researchers from different disciplines and intellectual traditions to share ideas and advance our understanding of cooperative behavior in a world that is more complex than ever before.

CHAPTER 1

Cooperation, Coordination, and Collective Action

Fresh water is a scarce resource around the world, but particularly in arid regions such as the American West. At one time, groundwater was sufficient for the needs of the region’s small population, but rapidly growing populations in recent years have led to the depletion of aquifers and the diversion of enormous amounts of water from the Colorado and other rivers. Conservation efforts have been, for the most part, sporadic and ineffective, and, for many communities in the region, a water crisis looms on the horizon.¹ In contrast, communities of farmers around the world have been successfully sharing irrigation water for many years. In some cases, such arrangements have existed for centuries. Farmers in Valencia, Spain, for example, still use rules for water distribution that were drawn up in 1435.²

Citizens of many countries are frustrated by ineffective and corrupt police forces. Although they may occasionally take matters into their own hands on an individual and ad hoc basis, it is rare for them to organize a viable alternative to the police. In Tanzania in the 1980s, such a rare event did occur. Members of the Sukuma ethnic group organized Sungusungu, a system of grassroots justice and vigilantism. Sungusungu was so successful that it was deputized by the Tanzanian government and imitated by other Tanzanian ethnic groups. But the imitators did not always share the success of the Sukuma. Members of the Pimbwe ethnic group, for example, attempted to form their own Sungusungu, but they eventually abandoned the effort in frustration.³

Slavery has existed in a wide variety of societies throughout history, but the Atlantic slave trade was by far the largest. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, approximately ten million Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas, and millions of their descendants lived their entire lives as slaves.⁴ Despite the fact that slaves outnumbered slave owners in many areas, slave rebellions did not occur often, and they were seldom successful. One of the rare exceptions occurred on board La Amistad, a slave ship, in 1839. After the ship docked in Connecticut, U.S. courts eventually found that the would-be slaves were free, and they returned to Africa.⁵

Every day, tens of thousands of commercial aircraft take off and land around the world. Many airports are extraordinarily busy, with some handling thousands of flights a day. Despite all of that traffic in the air and on the ground, collisions between planes are very rare. One such rare and tragic event resulted in the worst air disaster in history. On March 27, 1977, on the Spanish island of Tenerife, a Boeing 747 owned by KLM collided on takeoff with a Pan Am 747 taxiing on the ground. All of the 248 people aboard the KLM plane died, as did 335 people on the Pan Am jet.⁶

An eclectic topic needs an eclectic approach

Water management, vigilante movements, slave rebellions, and colliding aircraft. What could phenomena this diverse possibly have in common? They are all examples of cooperation of one kind or another, contrasted in each case with a similar situation in which cooperation failed to occur. We chose to begin our book with these examples to drive home an important point: Cooperation may occur all around us every day, but it should not be taken for granted. The forces working against successful cooperation are formidable, and the fact that cooperation occurs as often as it does is remarkable and noteworthy.

That, in a nutshell, is why we wrote this book.

In our final chapter, we will return to those four examples. For now, they serve to demonstrate that cooperation—working together to achieve a common goal—is a very broad and diverse phenomenon that includes a wide range of specific behaviors. Writing this book together is an act of cooperation. As we go about the rest of our daily lives, we cooperate in a wide variety of ways and with a wide range of people. At work, we coordinate our actions with coworkers and students in order to get our classes taught, our exams graded, our graduate students funded, and so on. In our community, we cooperate with other citizens when we volunteer with local nonprofits, attend events at our children’s schools, participate in civic organizations, and vote. When we shop, we cooperate with storekeepers through mutually beneficial exchanges of money for goods and services. When we drive, we cooperate with pedestrians, bicycle riders, and other drivers so that we may all get where we want to go. When we play, we cooperate not only with our teammates but also with members of the other team by adhering to a set of mutually agreed-upon rules.

Because cooperation is such a large and diverse phenomenon, understanding it will require a large tool kit of ideas drawn from a wide range of disciplines. In philosophers’ jargon, the study of cooperation needs to be a “historical” science rather than a “theoretical” or “Newtonian” one.⁷ The theoretical sciences are the simple, elegant ones that produce general theories of narrowly defined phenomena. Their simplicity and elegance is an outgrowth of how they define their subject matters. Physics, for example, has beautiful formal theories of the phenomena it studies because it studies only a very limited and carefully defined range of phenomena. When things get beyond that range, they become the realm of either another theoretical science (e.g., chemistry), a historical science (e.g., cosmology), or engineering. In the life sciences, the broad field of evolutionary biology includes a very well developed theoretical science regarding how evolution works in the abstract. In the social sciences, economics is the best developed theoretical science. As with physics, economics’ ability to develop in that way is a result of the narrow way that economists define their subject matter.

Historical sciences, in contrast, make use of whatever they need—insights from theoretical sciences, empirical observations, etc.—in order to explain their complex, varied, and roughly bounded subject matters. Historical sciences are, in a word, eclectic.⁸ In the physical sciences, they include such fields as geology, astronomy, and meteorology. In the life sciences, they include paleontology and animal behavior studies. In the social sciences, they include anthropology, sociology, geography, most of political science, and some aspects of economics. To illustrate the way historical sciences approach their phenomena, economist Friedrich Hayek suggested that we imagine what a scientist might do if her task were to study how a garden fills up with weeds. She would need to record a large number and wide variety of details about the garden, including its soil types, patterns of shade and sunlight, plant species, and so on. To understand her data, she would need to incorporate theoretical and empirical insights from a variety of fields, including chemistry, geology, and biology.⁹ Historian of science David B. Kitts has pointed out that paleontology, a biological science, must make use of the geological concept of superposition (i.e., newer material is usually on top of older material) in order to do one of its most important jobs, that of determining fossils’ relative ages.¹⁰ Similarly, absolute dating techniques, such as radiocarbon and argon-argon, require physics. For a historical science, such eclecticism is a source of strength. We will approach the study of cooperation in this same eclectic manner. This means that although we will certainly make use of existing formal theories regarding specific types of cooperation, we will not attempt to create a formal, mathematical theory that single-handedly explains all human cooperation. Rather, we will be discussing a wide range of ideas, theories, and existing empirical research relevant to the study of the complex and diverse phenomenon of human cooperation.

Olson, Williams, …

We will be drawing in particular upon two bodies of work that began separately but nearly simultaneously with the publication of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action in 1965 and George C. Williams’s Adaptation and Natural Selection in 1966.¹¹ Although Olson was an economist and Williams an evolutionary biologist, they dealt with similar issues and presented similar arguments. Both were arguing against scholars in their fields who had emphasized cooperation’s group-level benefits and discounted its individual-level costs. Both explained why a focus on groups would not provide a complete understanding of collective action and other social behaviors.

Mancur Olson argued that unless groups are small or “there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interest.”¹² Olson’s challenge led to work by social scientists regarding the obstacles people face when they might benefit from collective action and how even “rational self-interested individuals” can find ways to overcome them. As the civil rights movement and other mass mobilizations have shown empirically, efforts to overcome collective action dilemmas can be helped significantly by existing social institutions and networks. In some circumstances, entrepreneurial individuals will agree to pay more than their fair share of the costs of solving a collective action problem in hopes of recouping their losses in the future, sometimes in the form of salary or other remuneration from the successful group, and sometimes simply in the form of enhanced reputation.¹³ Modifying the costs and benefits of participation for different kinds of participants can provide enough people with an incentive to contribute to the effort for the collective action dilemma to be overcome. Another common strategy is to break large and difficult collective action problems down into smaller, easier ones by linking small groups in networks, nested segments, and hierarchies. Many of the major ideas emerging from the Olsonian tradition have been tested and found practical application in work on how, despite the free rider problem, groups of people do sometimes successfully cooperate.

Natural selection designs organisms through the differential survival and reproduction of various kinds of self-replicators—genes, individuals, groups, and so on.¹⁴ A major question in evolutionary theory is what happens when selection pressures at these different levels design organisms in different ways. Which level prevails? George Williams argued that, in most circumstances, natural selection at the level of individuals will be much stronger than selection at the level of groups. As a result, selection should have designed most adaptations to benefit individuals, with whatever benefits they might also provide the groups to which those individuals belong being purely fortuitous. This presented evolutionary biologists with a challenge similar to the one that Olson posed to social scientists: If group selection is rarely a very strong force in nature, how do we explain cooperation and other prosocial behaviors? Biologists responded to this challenge in a variety of ways. Selection at levels below the group can favor prosocial and even self-sacrificial behaviors if genetic relatives stand to benefit because the genes behind the behaviors may be passed on even if the altruistic individual fails to survive. Selection at low levels can even favor altruism toward nonrelatives if there is some chance that such kindness will eventually be repaid. More recently, intriguing arguments have been made about how our ancestors may have tipped the odds in favor of successful collective action by using physical and behavioral cues to distinguish likely cooperators from likely free riders, resulting in selection for cooperativeness and vigilance against cheaters.

… and many others, as well

In addition to Olson and Williams’s seminal work, we will also be relying upon the contributions of a great many other scholars from a wide range of disciplines. We will try to explain their work in ways that will make sense to all our readers, even those unfamiliar with the theories and terms of a particular scholar’s home discipline. The work of those many scholars comes in a variety of forms—theoretical, methodological, and empirical—and we will make use of all of them. Our emphasis will be on the complementarity we see among the varying approaches that have been taken to the study of cooperation by scholars working in different disciplines. Scientific explanations—the correct ones, anyway—are complementary to one another because they are explaining different aspects of the same universe. Just as the different bits and pieces of the universe fit together to form a coherent whole, so should different scientific theories fit together to form a coherent explanation of the universe. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has dubbed this complementarity among the disciplines consilience.¹⁵

One common way that explanations offered by different disciplines achieve consilience with one another is by focusing on different causes of the same phenomenon. It is often helpful to separate scientific explanations of a particular phenomenon according to the causal distance on which they focus. Some explanations are focused on causes that are very immediate, or proximate, to the thing being explained. An explanation of cooperation that focuses on the motivations experienced by the individuals involved, for example, would be of this proximate variety. Many explanations of cooperation that have emerged from the social and behavioral sciences focus on such proximate causes. Given that understanding proximate causes is often crucial to solving practical problems, such as either encouraging or discouraging cooperation, this focus makes a great deal of sense. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, takes a step away from the phenomenon in question and asks what evolutionary forces might have shaped it. Thus, a proximate explanation of cooperation in terms of motivations is complemented by an evolutionary explanation of how those motivations came to exist.

Complementarity among the disciplines that study cooperation exists at the methodological and empirical levels, as well. The methods that have been used to study cooperation are the same ones that have been used to study many other human behaviors. Experiments, observations, interviews, case studies, formal models, and agent-based models are the most prominent. All of these methods produce valuable data, but none of them is sufficient by itself. Experiments, for example, can tell us a great deal about why and how people cooperate or fail to cooperate in a controlled setting, but they are all the more valuable if they are accompanied by good qualitative descriptions of the contexts in which such cooperation arises or fails to arise in the real world. Formal and agent-based models can help us understand cooperation in abstract and refined ways, but they do not by themselves produce data about the real world.

One body of scholarship that has been extraordinarily important to the study of cooperation is game theory. Game theory is used to model situations in which an individual actor’s best choice of action is dependent upon the choices that others make. Though it originated only a few decades ago, game theory is now a large, highly developed, and complex body of formal mathematics. As such, formal game theory is beyond the scope of this volume, and we have written this book in a way that should be accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with game theory. Readers who do want to familiarize themselves with formal game theory might want to start with recent books by Ken Binmore and Herb Gintis.¹⁶ Readers interested in a more game theoretic or formal approach to the topic of cooperation in particular are directed to Russell Hardin’s excellent book on collective action, Scott Ainsworth’s book on interest groups, Pamela Oliver’s writing on social movements, and David Barash’s book on games and evolution.¹⁷

Game theory has also been i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Cooperation, Coordination, and Collective Action
• Chapter 2 Adaptation: A Special and Onerous Concept
• Chapter 3 The Logic of Logic, and Beyond
• Chapter 4 Cooperation and the Individual
• Chapter 5 Cooperation and Organizations
• Chapter 6 Meeting at Penn Station: Coordination Problems and Cooperation
• Chapter 7 Cooperation Emergent
• Chapter 8 Meeting at Grand Central
• Notes
• References
• Index