[acb-hsp] Putting "We" Ahead of "Me"

[peter altschul]

The More People Rely On Their Intuitions, The More Cooperative 
They Become, Putting "We" Ahead Of "Me"
  21 Sep 2012
  It's an age old question: Why do we do good? What makes people 
sometimes willing to put "We" ahead of "Me?"
  Perhaps our first impulse is to be selfish, and cooperation is 
all about reining in greed.  Or maybe cooperation happens 
spontaneously, and too much thinking gets in the way.  Harvard 
scientists are getting closer to an answer, showing that people's 
first response is to cooperate and that stopping to think 
encourages selfishness.
  David Rand, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Psychology, Joshua 
Greene, the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social 
Sciences in the Department of Psychology, and Martin Nowak, 
Professor of Mathematics and of Biology, and Director of the 
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, have published their findings 
in Nature.  They recruited thousands of participants to play a 
"public goods game" in which it's "Me" vs.  "U." Subjects were 
put into small groups and faced with a choice: Keep the money 
you've been given, or contribute it into a common pool that grows 
and benefits the whole group.  Hold onto the money and you come 
out ahead, but the group does best when everyone contributes.
  The researchers wanted to know whether people's first impulse 
is cooperative or selfish.  To find out, they started by looking 
at how quickly different people made their choices, and found 
that faster deciders were more likely to contribute to the common 
good.  Next they forced people to go fast or to stop and think, 
and found the same thing: Faster deciders tended to be more 
cooperative, and the people who had to stop and think gave less.
  Finally, the researchers tested their hypothesis by 
manipulating people's mindsets.  They asked some people to think 
about the benefits of intuition before choosing how much to 
contribute.  Others were asked to think about the virtues of 
careful reasoning.  Once again, intuition promoted cooperation, 
and deliberation did the opposite.
  While some might interpret the results as suggesting that 
cooperation is "innate" or "hard-wired," if anything they 
highlight the role of experience.  People who had better opinions 
of those around them in everyday life showed more cooperative 
impulses in these experiments, and previous experience with these 
kinds of studies eroded those impulses.
  "In daily life, it's generally in your interest to be 
cooperative," Rand said.  "So we internalize cooperation as the 
right way to behave.  Then when we come into unusual 
environments, where incentives like reputation and sanctions are 
removed, our first response is to keep behaving the way we do in 
normal life.  When we think about it, however, we realize that 
this is one of those rare situations where we can be selfish and 
get away with it."
  Unlike many psychology studies, which use small numbers of 
college students, these experiments tested thousands of people 
from around the world using Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online 
labor market that's becoming an increasingly popular tool for 
social science research.
  According to Rand, the findings highlight an interesting and 
counterintuitive truth -- that careful thought and reflection 
have a dark side.  But is reflection always bad?
  "When it's 'Me' vs.  'Us1' our intuitions seem to work well.  
That's what's going on here," explains Joshua Greene.  "But what 
happens when people have different moral intuitions, for example, 
about abortion or raising taxes? When intuitions clash -- when 
it's the values of 'Us' vs.  'Them' -- reasoning and reflection 
may be our best hope for reconciling our differences."
  "Over millions of years we've evolved the capacity for 
cooperation," explains Martin Nowak.  "These psychological 
experiments examine the causes of cooperation on a shorter 
timescale, on the order of seconds.  Both perspectives are 
essential as we face global problems which require cooperation on 
a massive scale.  We need to understand where cooperation comes 
from historically and how best to make it happen here and now."
  MLA Harvard University.  "The More People Rely On Their 
Intuitions, The More Cooperative They Become, Putting "We" Ahead 
Of "Me"." Medical News Today.  MediLexicon, Intl., 21 Sep.  2012.  
Web.  22 Sep.  2012.