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Selfishness Is Learned - Issue 37: Currents - Nautilus
Encouraging cooperation
In many situations, people are rewarded for backstabbing and ladder climbing.
In order to encourage cooperation where cooperation isn't the norm, companies might offer bonuses and recognition for cooperative behavior. Encouraging people to make decisions quickly can also bring out their better behavior.
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Key Ideas
Creating quantitative models
Most of the psychological theories are verbal, but words can be imprecise. If "cooperation is intuitive", it needs to state when. And what does "intuitive" mean?
In order to solve this, computer simulations of society were developed.
The Sims computer simulation
These models represent collections of individual people described by computer algorithms that capture a specific set of traits, such as a tendency to cooperate or not.
- You can give them new personalities to see how they would behave.
- You can observe social processes in action.
- You can observe time scales, from seconds to generations.
- You can watch the spread of certain behaviors throughout a population and you can see how certain behaviors influence other behaviors.
The patterns that emerge can tell you things about large-scale social interaction that lab experiments and real people never could.
The human instinct to cooperate
There seems to be evolutionary logic to the human ability to cooperate but adjust if necessary. To trust, but verify.
We generally collaborate with other people because it benefits us. Our rational minds let us work out when we might occasionally gain by acting selfishly instead.
Getting people to cooperate more
Our intuitions are not fixed at birth. We develop social rules of thumb for interpersonal behavior based on the interactions we have.
Change those interactions, and you change behavior.
Encouraging cooperation
In many situations, people are rewarded for backstabbing and ladder climbing.
In order to encourage cooperation where cooperation isn't the norm, companies might offer bonuses and recognition for cooperative behavior. Encouraging people to make decisions quickly can also bring out their better behavior.
Understanding morality
Psychologists do not understand human moral behavior, because it seldom makes any logical sense.
Using moral philosophy and psychology, biology, economics, mathematics, and computer science, scientists are trying to study how morality operates in the real world.
Our default mode
Through a series of experiments, it was discovered that despite the temptation to be selfish, most people show selflessness.
This is particularly true when subjects were forced to make their decision under time pressure; people are prone to cooperation when they rely more on intuition.
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The rational manner
When faced with a difficult dilemma, we should carefully assess our options and spend a few moments consciously deliberating the information. Then, we should choose the best fit for our preferences...
The emotional system
This would suggest that the unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain, that the very thought process we've long disregarded as irrational and impulsive might actually be "smarter" than reasoned deliberation.
How emotional decision-making works
Thinking in a rational manner is more effective when there are limited pieces of information. However, those focused on feelings prove far better in complex conditions.
The advantages of emotional decision-making could be undone by a subsequent bout of deliberation, which suggests that we shouldn't doubt a particularly strong instinct, at least when considering lots of information.
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We’re Hardwired To Gossip
Our prehistoric ancestors lived in small intimate groups. To survive they needed to cooperate with in-group members while also competing for mates and limited resources.
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Social Isolation
Sharing secrets is one way people bond, so avoiding gossip may lead to social isolation. Someone skillful at gossip can be socially informed and have a good rapport with others. On the other hand, someone who doesn’t gossip may become an outsider, neither trusted nor accepted by the group.
Gossip also helps to integrate newcomers into groups by exposing group norms and values.
Fear Of Whispers Keeps Us In Check
The awareness that others are likely talking about us can keep us in line. Among a group of friends or coworkers, the threat of becoming the target of gossip can deter “free-riders” and cheaters.
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Understanding the world through mental models
A few months ago, the world seemed reliable, but now it is changing so fast and has so many unknown dimensions, it can be hard to try and keep up.
Mental models can help us understand the wo...
Compounding
Compounding is exponential growth. We tend to see the immediate linear relationships in the situation, e.g., how one test diagnoses one person.
The compounding effect of that relationship means that increased testing can lead to an exponential decrease in disease transmission because one infected person can infect more than just one person.
Probabilistic thinking
In the absence of enough testing, we need to use probabilistic thinking to make decisions on what actions to take. Reasonable probability will impact your approach to physical distancing if you estimate the likelihood of transmission as being three people out of ten instead of one person out of one thousand.
When you have to make decisions with incomplete information, use inversion: Look at the problem backward. Ask yourself what you could do to make things worse, then avoid doing those things.
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