"A farmer asks another farmer, 'Why did the scarecrow win an award?''Because he was outstanding in his field!' his companion replies.""Why should humans cooperate? Is it because we're all pulling in the same direction where everyone is working toward a common goal and collaborating in unity? Or are we all cogs in a machine where each one plays a specific role, contributing to the smooth functioning of the whole? In general, answers to this question can take a normative ('what should be') or positive ('what is') perspective," Cananga proceeded to look at The Berlin Wall Memorial. Once separating East and West Berlin during the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a triumph of friendship over division."Many human behaviors are cultural in that they are socially learned by observation and interaction in a social group—social learning can then be understood as the foundational capacity that underpins what is typically glossed as 'culture.' All culturally acquired behaviors, beliefs, preferences, strategies, and practices are also genetic in the sense that their acquisition requires brain machinery that allows for substantial amounts of complex, high-fidelity social learning.More generally, although limited social learning abilities are found elsewhere in nature, social learning in our species is high fidelity, frequent, internally motivated, often unconscious, and broadly applicable, with humans learning everything from motor patterns to goals and affective responses, in domains ranging from toolmaking and food preferences to altruism and spatial cognition. If other animals are ‘‘cultural,’’ then we are a hypercultural species."Cooperative (or prosocial) behaviors refers to cases in which an individual pays a personal cost to provide a benefit to another individual or group of individuals. Cost is broadly defined, by considering a wide range of potential costs including time and effort, resources and money, and physical harm. In most of the cases that are considered, the cost of cooperation is smaller than the benefit it creates, making cooperation productive: pairs or groups of individuals who can successfully cooperate are better off than those who cannot. Because of the benefits cooperation creates, many people consider there to be a moral obligation to cooperate.What does it mean to be moral? Traditionally, philosophers have focused on normative answers to this question, whereas psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and social scientists have focused on the positive aspects of morality: How and why did our sense of morality evolve? What psychological processes contribute to our moral judgments? Which moral rules are universal, and which vary across cultures?All around us, we see people contributing to the welfare of others, even when it is not convenient and may be costly in terms of time or money, or may affect their personal or professional relationships. We see so much of this sort of altruism in daily life that we usually don’t notice it or stop to question why people are bothering to help others, or how such seemingly ubiquitous generosity might be explained. When people are asked why they help others, a common reply is that doing so is ‘the right thing to do’ and that people ‘should' help one another. Some of us have merely accepted such acts as part of being human, without endeavoring to question why we help sometimes, but not at other times, or why different societies seem to provide help to differing degrees and in different domains. In fact, not only are there times that we don’t help when we know we could have, but there are many times when we don’t even perceive an opportunity for helping when, in fact, one exists.Cooperation is ubiquitous in the world around us, at a large scale with humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross to conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, and on a small scale with people choosing to cover shifts for sick co-workers or to help friends move from one apartment to another. Although a gene’s-eye view of evolution can explain cooperation among relatives, cooperation between unrelated individuals poses a puzzle from both the perspective of natural selection and that of rational self-interest. Why should individuals make sacrifices to help potential competitors succeed? What motivates such prosocial behavior?Research shows that if cooperation actually pays off, evolution and rational self-interest can both favor cooperating. Perhaps the most important mechanism for most human interactions is direct reciprocity: individuals interact repeatedly and condition their cooperative behavior on the cooperation of their partners.For direct reciprocity to work, both sides have to be repeatedly in contact so that there is an opportunity to repay one act of kindness to another. They might live in the same road or village. Perhaps they work together. Or they may encounter each other every Friday in the Masjid. In this way, they can form a 'contract' based on helping each other.One way to determine which examples of direct reciprocity are real is to think about the qualities that are necessary for this mechanism to work. The evolution of cooperation by direct reciprocity requires that players recognize their present partner and remember the outcome of previous encounters with him or her. They need some memory to remember what another creature has done to them, and a little bit of brainpower to figure out whether to reciprocate. In other words, direct reciprocity requires reasonably advanced cognitive abilities.Direct reciprocity can make cooperation between pairs of individuals advantageous. But what about cooperation at a larger scale than dyadic interactions? This question is answered in part by indirect reciprocity, whereby 'my actions toward you depend on your previous actions toward others'. Under indirect reciprocity, people earn good reputations when they cooperate with others and thus can expect increased cooperation from future partners.Kindness will elicit kindness. In this way, circles of humanity, tolerance, and understanding can loop through and around our society. Either way, it is a powerful form of cooperation, and its implications are huge, shaping how we behave, how we communicate, and how we think.While direct reciprocity relies on your own experience of another person, indirect reciprocity also takes into account the experience of other people. Exploring the indirect form of reciprocity is important because it is critical for society. Direct reciprocity—'I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine'—operates well within small groups of people, or in villages where there is a tight-knit community where it would be hard to get away with cheating one another.Societies could more easily evolve to become larger, more complex, and interconnected if their citizens depended on economic exchanges that relied on indirect reciprocity. Today, this is central to the way we conduct our affairs and cooperate. With the help of gossip, chat, and banter we are able to gauge the reputation of other people, sizing them up, or marking them down, to decide how to deal with them. This sheds light on both the proliferation of charity and of glossy celebrity gossip magazines.Thanks to the power of reputation, we think nothing of paying one stranger for a gift and then waiting to receive delivery from another stranger, thanks also to the efforts of various other people whom we have never met and will never meet—from the person who packs our gift to the one who checks our credit rating. In our vast society, it is a case of: 'I scratch your back and someone else will scratch mine.' We all depend on third parties to ensure that those who scratch backs will have theirs scratched eventually.Under the influence of indirect reciprocity, our society is not only larger than ever but also more intricate. The increasing size of modern communities can now support a greater subdivision of physical and cognitive labor. People can specialize when networks of indirect reciprocity enable a person to establish a reputation for being skilled at a particular job. By the power of reputation, great collections of mutually dependent people in a society can now sustain individuals who are specialized to an extraordinary degree, so that some of its denizens can spend much of their time thinking about how to capture the quintessence of cooperation in mathematical terms while others are paid to think about how to express mathematical terms about cooperation. It’s amazing.Social norms within a community specify standards for acceptable behavior, and information about individuals’ behavior is spread through gossip. Successful social norms often assign good reputations to those who cooperate with others with good reputations and defect with those who have bad reputations. Thus, individuals with good reputations are then rewarded because they are more likely to be the recipients of cooperative behavior.There are two distinct reasons why one might preferentially cooperate with individuals who are known to be cooperative. One might reason that individuals who are known to be cooperative are more likely to reciprocate cooperative behavior. Thus, individuals may discriminate based on reputation as a way to select desirable interaction partners. Alternatively, one might cooperate with other cooperators merely to maintain a good reputation and thus receive more cooperation in the future. Rather than using a partner’s previous behavior as a signal about her future behavior, the partner’s previous behavior stipulates what you must do to maintain a good reputation yourself.Experimental work confirms the theorized importance of reputation in promoting human cooperation: people playing economic games learn to cooperate when it is sufficiently likely that others will know about their previous actions. Furthermore, evidence suggests that humans are so highly attuned to their reputations that even subtle images of eyespots can increase cooperation by unconsciously priming the sense of being watched. Reputation systems have also been shown to promote cooperation outside the laboratory: blood donation and giving to charity increase when donors’ names are published, and people are three times as likely to sign up for an energy blackout reduction program when sign-ups are observable.Scaling up even further, institutions provide an important tool for maintaining cooperation in large groups. Humans often explicitly design institutions to incentivize good behavior. For example, governments create criminal justice systems, often employing police and courts, to prevent anti-social behaviors such as theft and assault. Such legal institutions have a long history in human societies. Smaller organizations also employ formal codes of conduct and often designate specific individuals to enforce the rules.Institutions may also refer to social structures that create infrastructure for cooperative exchanges, like markets. Markets provide a regulated environment for strangers to engage in productive trades of goods and services. In general, institutions can promote cooperation both by deterring bad behavior and by promoting trust that others will cooperate. The role of institutions in human cooperation has received much less attention among experimentalists using economic games than direct and indirect reciprocity.The suggestion that cooperation is only about maximizing long-term payoffs does not match well with our daily life experiences. A brief moment of introspection indicates that all cooperative behavior does not result from conscious calculations of expected returns. We are surrounded by examples of people who seem to help because they genuinely care for others. Almost all of us have acted altruistically at one time or another without considering future returns, only motivated by our notions of morality and ethical behavior.Why people cooperate can be explained by outlining how cooperation pays off in the long run. Outlining the motivations, emotions, and cognitions that lead to cooperation at the moment, can explain how people cooperate. Empathy is one of the most important explanations for motivating cooperative behavior. Empathetic concern is a human emotional response to taking the perspective of another person in need. Empathetic concern motivates humans to see what needs relieving, often through cooperative helping. A large body of studies has shown that experimentally manipulating empathic concern increases cooperative behaviors and cooperation with the target in economic games. Furthermore, evidence suggests that empathic individuals experience positive mood changes when they see a need get relieved, even if another agent caused the relief—suggesting that empathic concern reflects genuine care for others.As social beings who live and work together and who share and compete for limited resources, we constantly encounter, and sometimes create cooperation problems. At times we cooperate out of habit, without even realizing it. Other times, lacking a social norm, we miss opportunities for cooperation. The scale of the problem can range from one involving two people that can easily be solved with reciprocity, to a global problem involving every person on the planet that can be solved only with regulations, carefully constructed incentive structures, monitoring, and enforcement, and the evolution of appropriate social norms.The most obvious cooperation problems are those involving the use and protection of the environment and natural resources. Everyone uses and is affected by the environment. The effects of the actions of any one individual are insignificant, and the cumulative effects of the actions of many individuals are enormous. All people use environmental resources, and some environmental resources, such as air, are used by every person on earth. When billions of people are all using the same common resource, a cooperative dilemma is created that can only be solved if leaders step forward and organize, regulate, or inspire people to cooperate. Because so many people use the same resources, many individuals believe that they should not control their use of the resource because other people aren’t controlling their use. If one person limits his use, but others do not, then he will be incurring an individual cost even though the benefit of his regulated behavior will have no effect on the overall sustainability or health of the resource so long as everyone else in the world continues to use the resource unabated.Cooperation problems can occur wherever more than one person is interacting, such as in the workplace. Anyone who works outside the home is familiar with the problem of employees coming to work when they are sick. There are many reasons why you may go to work sick, even though you risk infecting others. Among the reasons: using up sick days that could be saved for times when you’re even sicker or that could be used to take a day off (why waste a sick day on staying home sick when you can use it to take a long weekend?); losing income, in the form of wages, lost sales, or business; or falling behind in work that still needs to get done. When you stay home because of sickness, you may incur costs, but your coworkers benefit by continuing to enjoy a healthy workplace. However, the workplace retains a healthy environment only if people stay home when they’re sick. If one person defects and comes to work ill, then the healthy status of the workplace declines. Other people may decide that they too will come to work sick because the workplace is already unhealthy, so there’s no reason to stay home, or because they don’t want to incur the costs of staying home when other people aren’t willing to do the same. Workplaces develop a culture or set of norms about coming to work when sick. Though some offices can maintain their healthy status, other workplaces accept that people may come to work sick.Cooperation with unrelated individuals is a hallmark of humankind despite the temptation to behave selfishly. Mechanisms that create future consequences for present actions can make cooperation pay off in the longer term and allow cooperation to arise and be maintained.Intrinsic motivations for cooperative behavior arise as a result of extrinsic incentives that make cooperation advantageous. Intrinsic motivation is defined as the motivation to engage in a behavior because of the inherent satisfaction of the activity rather than the desire for a reward or specific outcome. Intrinsic motivation occurs when we act without any obvious external rewards: 'We simply enjoy an activity or see it as an opportunity to explore, learn, and actualize our potential.' The three main elements of intrinsic motivation are autonomy, purpose, and mastery. People are intrinsically motivated when they can act independently, feel that their efforts matter, and gain satisfaction from becoming more skilled. Emotions like empathy promote cooperative behavior.Intrinsic motivation can be contrasted with extrinsic motivation, which involves engaging in a behavior to earn external rewards or avoid punishment. Internal motivation arises from within, while external motivation comes from outside forces. Extrinsic motivation is a motivation that is driven by external rewards. These can be tangible, such as money or grades, or intangible, such as praise or fame. Unlike intrinsic motivation, which arises from within the individual, extrinsic motivation is focused purely on outside rewards. People who are extrinsically motivated will continue to perform a task even though it might not be in and of itself rewarding. For example, they will do something at their job that they don't find enjoyable to earn a wage. Extrinsic motivation is involved in operant conditioning, which is when someone or something is conditioned to behave a certain way due to a reward or consequence.Extrinsic incentives can also crowd out, or undermine, intrinsic motivation. People attend to and monitor the cooperative behaviors of others. Individuals respond to cooperative (and noncooperative) behavior both when the behavior has directly affected them (as second parties) and when it has not (as third parties).So now, let's imagine that somewhere, there are people who want to move a large table into the middle of a room. Of course, we call the people who lift the table the people who cooperate. But are they working together? Then, what about those who were there but didn't lift the table? Perhaps our naughty minds will mutter that they are just people watching, indifferent, and don't care.But what if those who didn't lift the table, gave some signal or warning to those who lifted the table so that they slightly moved to the right because they were moving to the left or vice versa? So how do we evaluate those who don't lift the table, but are willing to give directions without being paid or rewarded compared to those who lift the table with a fee or reward? Probably, without someone giving a signal or warning, the target of placing the table in the middle of the room will not work.'We’re all pieces of a puzzle'. Each of us is a unique puzzle piece with our color. Each piece plays a specific role, and together, they complete the task or project to get the big picture. And a good picture emerges when you combine technical skills with a thoughtful POV. Our perspective is unique. Don’t settle for the first angle you see, change your POV. A good picture goes beyond technical correctness. It engages viewers, evokes emotions, and tells a story. It has unique perspectives, the elements in our scene, focal points, and of course, leading lines, natural lines to lead the viewer’s eye into the frame.We'll go on with our discussion on the next episode, biidhnillah."
Citations & References:
- Jean Decety & Thalia Wheatley (Eds.), The Moral Brain: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, 2015, The MIT Press
- Natalie Henrich & Joseph Henrich, Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation, 2007, Oxford University Press
- Carol Sansone & Judith M, Harackiewicz, Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: The Search for Optimal Motivation and Performance, 2000, Academic Press
- Martin A. Nowak & Roger Highfield, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed, 2011, Free Press
