Why We Cooperate (Boston Review Books) Hardcover – August 28, 2009

Michael Tomasello's little book, Why We Cooperate is an interesting interdisciplinary approach towards understanding how humans come to cooperate in societies. I highly suggest accompanying this book with Philosopher John Searle's newest book, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Searle and Tomasello frequently cite each other's work; combining the two men's work together really creates a more powerful and complete argument.

As to the book, the first half is a short essay by Tomasello while the second half consists of critiques by Joan B. Silk (How Humans Evolved (Fifth Edition)), Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success), Brian Skyrms (Evolution of the Social Contract) and Elizabeth S. Spelke. I thought all the contributions were good, but I was most drawn to Tomasello's compelling observation that, "The remarkable human capacity for cooperation therefore seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the local group. Such group-mindedness in cooperation is, perhaps ironically, a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today. The solution - more easily described than attained - is to find new ways to define the group." This is a powerful statement and I would following up this whole in-group/ out-group dichotomy with another book by David Berreby called Us and Them: The Science of Identity - it's also a wonderful book.

In many respects this book is just like Frans de Waal's Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton Science Library) and would recommend buying this if you are interested in morality. Lastly, I would simply add that Frans de Waal mentions a research experiment in which he "demonstrates" primate empathy, but as Tomasello points out, "But studies [contra de Waal] from three different laboratories in the case of the capuchins, and from our laboratory in the case of the chimpanzees, have all found that this is a spurious result in that it does not depend on a social comparison at all. One of the studies found that simply seeing and expecting to receive the grape makes the cucumber look less attractive to chimpanzees. No other individuals need to be around. There is no social comparison going on, only food comparison. So nothing related to norms of fairness are at work either (pg. 32)." I hope this helps and I kindly recommend this book.

Tomasello has come to my attention from two sub areas of interest. The first was Axel Honneth's poorly developed book on reification. According to Honneth, Tomasello has empirically demonstrated that infants have an ontogenetic faculty of deep empathy and recognition of fellow human beings. But most of us know that adults don't have much empathy for other people, and have a hard time 'recognizing' the other (think the entire Republican party). For Honneth this is the new starting point to develop a theory of reification.

I also watch a lot of NOVA specials, and frequently the Max Planck institute for social research is featured with some amazing experiment regarding chimpanzees and/or toddlers. This is the institute that Tomasello works for.

Having been piqued by his research I picked up Why We Cooperate which, in only 100 pages, sets out to develop an interesting thesis. He begins with the question: was Hobbes or Rousseau right? Are we born nasty, and brutish, and hardly concerned with others, or are we born angelic and since fallen from grace due to the evolution of civilization? Tomasello is not as radical as Rousseau, he won't damn all of civilization, but he's convinced that we are born mostly altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic (i.e., he sides with Rousseau). He highlights about a dozen studies that reveal just how compassionate and innately concerned children are. He doesn't speculate much on why humans lose their ability to be altruistic, but he does show nearly conclusively that altruism is innate, and not learned. If anything is learned over time, it's how NOT to be altruistic. Society deprives us of our angelic nature. There is one study that really highlights this. If very young children see someone carrying a stack of books and bumping into a door, they know to walk over and open the door for the person (you can youtube these studies). It doesn't matter if the child is alone in the room, or if the parent is there prodding them along, the child always opens the door (meaning this isn't parent directed altruism). But, if the child is given a reward for opening the door, they are less likely to open it a second time, and a third time, and so on. The more rewards they get for doing a good deed, the less inclined they are to do the deed again. The speculation is that the act has initial intrinsic value, but once the intrinsic value is substituted for some material value, the act loses its worth. This is exactly the OPPOSITE view of man that most people, especially economist and politicians, hold. They all believe people need material and monetary motivation to keep doing good things. What is actually happening is that people are constantly being 'rewarded' for acts they would have done anyway, and are now losing the inclination to do them for the right reasons. If you reflect on this point for all of ten seconds, it quickly becomes apparent just how rotten capitalism is.

In order to quell doubts that Tomasello isn't painting a romantic picture of human-beings, he conducts the exact same studies on chimpanzees. Although they're not completely unconcerned, their ability to share, and conduct altruistic acts, is far less prominent than humans. This leads him to believe that there is some evolutionary advantage to our innate altruism. Although, I don't think the chimpanzee studies much matter one way or the other regarding human altruism (and some of Tomsello's critics contend this point frequently, i.e., these ape studies are superfluous and not as informative as he thinks).

Toward the end of the book things become too speculative for my taste. Evolutionary Psychology often seems like a complete pseudo-science once it starts abstracting back before civilization. Comparing humans to chimpanzees, Tomasselo tries to give an evolutionary account for our unique set of altruistic traits. None of these speculations are wholly empirical, and always abstractly hypothetical. I don't think it much matters why we evolved these traits; the real important question is why are we no longer exercising them, and what's the cause?

This book is a good read for anyone interested in human nature. It is divided into two parts. The first part presents Michael Tomasello's hypothesis about human cooperation. The second part presents a forum of four scholars' responses to his ideas. All are clearly written and cogently reasoned.
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Michael Tomasello's hypothesis, which he supports with research findings, is that human children are "born" to cooperate. Only later as they mature are they "bred" to cooperate when they learn culturally specific social norms for how to do things and how one ought to do things. Thus, cooperation is a combination of innate and learned behavior.

In my view, the most important contribution to our twenty-first century tumultuous times is Tomasello's observation that human group mindedness in cooperation--to the extent that it motivates people to collaborate as a group--has a down side. When it results in seeing "others" as out-group threats to our in-group, it produces strife and suffering in the world. The "others" become enemies that "threaten us." His solution, which he notes is "more easily described than attained," is to find new ways to define the group. To me this means that the more "others" that are included in the definition of "us," the more we promote cooperation and lessen suffering.