Showing posts with label Cooperation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cooperation. Show all posts

Amazing Drives


In many social animal species, we see cooperation. Often those cooperating are related. Humans are among the species that cooperate effectively without being related. One of the current ideas is that this is learned over a long period and is based on the idea that we discern other to have thoughts and feelings similar to ours, which makes that cooperation work.

With a big magnet free, the big question can be asked what parts of the brain are working hard when we cooperate. Krill and colleagues gave 28 participants driving tests while having fMRI scans of their brains and reported on their results in the Public Library of Science (1).

The driving was through a maze on a computer screen. No easy task as they had a time limit to drive through each maze and they were presented with multiple mazes. It may be hard enough trying to drive through a maze when getting an fMRI, but this was just the baseline.

The real challenge was putting the participants in pairs and blindfolding the driver. The other person acted as instructor, indicating right, left, accelerate or brake NOW! They then changed places so that the other could shout at the driver.

After all this excitement the pictures were analyzed. Lots of brain activity of course. Now comes the really exciting part. Each person’s baseline image was subtracted from their blind driving images and there was consistently more activity in two regions when people were cooperating.

The regions were the orbital frontal cortex, and the caudate nucleus, right in the center of the brain. This part is associated with learning and feedback processes, but is also loaded with dopamine neurons. This means that there is a reward feeling (we like dopamine hitting our receptors) when we’re cooperating.

So it appears that we’re hard wired to cooperate with each other. It is interesting that the participants, who were 24 – 25-years old, were made up of 18 women and 10 men. However, the make-up of the pairs wasn’t given in the paper, so we don’t know if things would work better or worse if a blindfolded male was paired with a female instructor or vice versa. We are left to our prejudices remembering that men are notorious for not stopping to ask directions when lost.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030613



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The Money Game


Our social psychologist friends love to play games to see how we behave. One of the games of choice used to study social cooperation is known as the Dictator Game. The game shows how benevolent your dictatorship is going to be. The player is offered an asset and asked if they would care to share it and how much of it they would care to share. Of course, the social psychologist is looking at average group responses and not just you or me, so they can draw broad expansive conclusions that help with our stereotyping.

Nettle et al from England’s old Geordie city of Newcastle upon Tyne have turned their social psych’s magnifier on their hometown (1). They chose two areas of the city, one comfortably off and the other somewhat deprived and offered to send them a £10 note through the mail if they filled in a survey.

This is where they turned to game play and asked if they would like to give some or all of it away. It could be to an anonymous person, a friend or a charity, but the recipient had to live at another address. Note that each “Dictator” had only one type of “Recipient” to consider. They had no choice. As sweeteners, those who had a charity choice were offered a matching donation from the organizers. For those that could be generous to friends, if they donated the whole amount, their friend would receive £20.

The results? Well, to me the big surprise was that there were 40 people who had the “help your friend” offer out of the 118 who played the game and they didn’t do a deal with their friend to share £20 in a 50/50 split.

In fact, in the comfortable neighborhood, the average donation to a friend was the lowest of the three donations at about £4 compared to almost £5 to a stranger and nearly£8 to a charity.

In the deprived area, giving cash to a stranger didn’t seem a good idea – maybe a cup of tea, but probably not. About 50p to a friend was average and about £3 to charity was about it.

What conclusions can we draw? If you’re on hard times, you don’t throw your money about, but you can still have your arm twisted for charitable purposes. If you’re sitting comfortably in Geordieland, you’d give more to a stranger than a friend. Maybe your “friends” are your competitors? But, the big question, the elephant in the room, is why didn’t the Geordies get together with their friends and share a £20 dinner?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026922

Playing For Keeps


From an early age we learn to play and cooperate in groups. The practice stays with us into the workplace. Along with the group play comes the competitive play between groups. That competition can become severe and be to the detriment of a company if the employees are siloed into strongly competing groups. The apparent cure is to be inclusive, but does this really work?



Here we move into the realm of game theory and Public Good Games, PGG. This type of game has groups of people with individual budgets and they can choose to put some money into their group(s) pot or not. That is they are a cooperator or a defector. A multiplier is then announced for the round and the pot is split evenly among the group members. An individual’s resources increase most if he/she freeloads and lets other people risk their investment. Investments are anonymous, of course. It would be impolite to look at what your neighbor is doing with his/her cash, wouldn’t it?

Inclusiveness in these groups is not a very good idea as the freeloaders will gradually encourage everyone to freeload so, after a few rounds, no one is investing in the group. Carrots or sticks can be introduced to make people more cooperative but still the big banner of inclusiveness is flying high. We know that the philosophy is politically correct but is it financially and fiducially wise? Clearly not.

Smaldino and Lubell of UCal Davis have set the game up with a variation of a capacity constraint on top of the normal budget constraint. This allows players to join a table if there is a vacant seat and they can join more than one group. The big constraint is that each player’s investment decision is the same for each table that he/she is claiming a seat at for any particular round. Hedge fund managers would clearly not be welcome as they would clearly want to bet more cash on winners and against losers. Also players can leave a table and join a different one if a seat is available so the network is dynamic and can evolve.

The result, which I find extremely interesting, is that the evolution went to eliminating freeloading and encouraging cooperation. So putting the capacity or size limitation on the group leads towards the evolution of high performing groups with less freeloading than with a fully inclusive model. A somewhat scary thought when we turn our thoughts to the democratic process.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023019