Mutualistic cooperation

Early days in the research but intriguing in its implications. From Common Knowledge Makes Us More Cooperative by Avital Andrews.

If you know that someone knows something that you also know, does that make you more likely to cooperate with them? A new study out of Harvard suggests the answer is yes.

Social psychology has plenty of studies that examine altruism, but there hasn’t been much research that looks into its obscure cousin, “mutualistic cooperation”—that is, when people cooperate to benefit each other and themselves.

[snip]

The resulting study, published last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that when people have common knowledge, they’re much likelier to act in each others’ best interest.

“Because it may be costly to engage in a coordinated activity when no one else does so, attempts to coordinate can be risky when it is unclear what other people will do,” the paper explains. “If one protester shows up he gets shot, but if a million show up they may send the dictator packing"

I find this suggestive on two fronts.

In economics, there is the concept of Transaction Costs, "a cost incurred in making an economic exchange." When you buy a $100,000 house, your total cost is not $100,000. There is the time you spent searching for the home. There are the agent fees, the inspection fees, mortgage costs, insurance costs, etc. which can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of the transaction. You might pay $15,000 all up in order to buy the $100,000 home. That is not insignificant. Transaction costs are a material, though sometimes necessary, drag on an economy. The more you can lower transaction costs, the more activity you get.

There is something very similar going on in decision-making. You might call it epistemological transaction costs.

If you and I and the rest of the team are working off of a pool of common knowledge, I can better anticipate what decision you are going to make and can better prepare for efficient discussions. I can materially lower the epistemological transaction costs. Now there is a counter-issue. Uniformity of knowledge also tends to reduce the diversity of knowledge, i.e. the capacity to subject a decision to rigorous review from multiple perspectives. So there is always a dynamic tension going on between the efficiency that comes from lower epistemological transaction costs (uniform knowledge) and the longer term effectiveness that arises from more diverse knowledge.

This ties in with the central argument E.D. Hirsch was making back in the mid-1980s with his classic, Cultural Literacy. There is some core body of knowledge, without which it becomes difficult to function effectively and equally with others who share that knowledge. Hirsch was approaching the issue substantially from a social justice perspective. If we can figure out what the common core of knowledge is to function as an equal participant, we can begin to eliminate some of the inequalities that exist.

Cultural Literacy is the informing thought behind the educational effort known as Common Core.

Multiculturalism and Cultural Literacy (Common Core) can appear to be in conflict with one another but they are the ying and yang of a dynamic epistemological system. You need at least some diversity of knowledge, experience, and behavior for the system to evolve but you also need some common base of shared knowledge to facilitate trust and easy decision-making. It is not an either-or issue so much as a golden mean issue (where the mean is always shifting based on exogenous circumstances.)