02/05/2024

The Science of Getting Along

The mechanisms that sustain cooperation are now well understood

All around us seems to be conflict. The Global Conflict Tracker lists 27 conflicts around the world today; a sample of 1,490 leaders polled by the World Economic Forum said the biggest societal risk this year was polarization; and even Taylor Swift has been targeted for fear she’ll endorse President Biden and sway the 2024 election. Why can’t we just all get along?

Surprisingly, we do. Humans are almost ant-like in the scale and range of our cooperation and conflict of all kinds are less frequent and devastating than they were in the past. We take it for granted but we should be amazed that people from so many diverse places across the globe can live, work and even commute on crammed trains and planes in peace. A plane full of chimpanzees who didn’t know each other would be a plane full of dead and maimed apes, blood and body parts strewn through the aisles, as primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy reflected in her widely acclaimed book, Mothers and Others.

The mechanisms that sustain cooperation are now well understood. The most ancient of these is “inclusive fitness,” or cooperation among family and small tribes through shared genes. Ongoing cooperation for mutual benefit, or “direct reciprocity,” is the basis of friendships and networks. This mechanism, too, is ancient and found across the animal kingdom. Mutual benefit reaches our extended networks through reputation and shared norms—the basis of cooperation among those who share religion, politics and other group memberships. This is a uniquely human form of cooperation facilitated by our ability to gossip and keep track of everyone around us, even strangers.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.