Arbitration & Mediation

Looking for More Cooperation? Expand the Group

By Victoria Pynchon

Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antrhopology, authors "Idea Lab" in this morning's Sunday New York Times Magazine, asking How are Humans  Unique?

Absent our collaborative skills, Tomasello tells us, we're not even the smartest animals on the planet.  When comparing adult chimpanzees and orangutans to 2-year-old human children, Tomasello and his colleagues found that apes and toddlers performed equally well on  on every test other than those measuring social skills -- "social learning, communicating and reading the intentions of others."

We've always known that if you put a human infant on a desert island, he dies.  This does not distinguish us from other social animals who depend upon their family, clan, group or tribe for survival.

What's new is Tomasello's observation that we're the only social animal who shares for the sake of sharing.  "Human infants," he writes

gesture and talk in order to share information with others — they want to be helpful. They also share their emotions and attitudes freely — as when an infant points to a passing bird for its mother and squeals with glee. This unprompted sharing of information and attitudes can be seen as a forerunner of adult gossip, which ensures that members of a group can pool their knowledge and know who is or is not behaving cooperatively. The free sharing of information also creates the possibility of pedagogy — in which adults impart information by telling and showing, and children trust and use this information with confidence. Our nearest primate relatives do not teach and learn in this manner.

That's the good news.  Here's the bad.

[H]umans beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside “the group.” Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten “us.” The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today.

This evolutionary biologist is not content, however, to simply describe primate (that's us) behavior.  He also hopes to improve it. 

Tomasello's elegant solution to a seeminly intractable problem?  

Find new ways to define the group.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on May 25, 2008 (boomark / email).