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Nowak proposes five mechanisms that explain, in the light of evolution, why an individual decides to collaborate with the other. The first is direct reciprocity: I help you and you help me.
The second is indirect reciprocity: I help you, so I earn a good reputation and another person helps me through this reputation. The third is spatial reciprocity: I help my neighbors and thus increases my chances of being helped.
The fourth is the selection of groups, which is based on the fact that groups of "cooperators" do better than "selfish" groups. The fifth is the selection of kinship: I help my family members because I am more likely to share genes with them and I want to spread these genes to the people
"Cooperation – Beyond the competition – "
Communication Is Essential
In addition to the experiences in which the participants must decide whether they will help his colleagues or not in different circumstances, another method to study how people cooperate with each other is theoretically, through mathematical models.
According to Francisco C. Santos, professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon, these studies Theorists are based on a branch of mathematics called game theory.
"Game theory is to use mathematics to study conflict of interest," Santos says. For example, if a person is willing to pay a cost to provide a benefit to someone, it is possible to use that data to build equations that can predict the dynamics that can occur in different scenarios.
"If we can understand what the underlying cooperation mechanisms are, this knowledge is useful for promoting cooperation where it does not exist. "
Despite the evolving benefits of adopting a cooperative attitude, it's easy to think of real-life situations where no one is willing to help people – or, worse, circumstances. in which selfish attitudes propagate through society as a virus.In fact, some research shows that acts of indifference can be as contagious as acts of altruism.
According to Martin Nowak, the Kindness only spreads in society when the mechanisms that allow such diffusion are strong enough, for example, if the person helping his neighbor earns enough reputation for others to decide to help him, then kindness will spread in this group
"If this mechanism is not strong enough, cooperation will lose and indifference will win," says the researcher.
One of the essential ingredients for ensuring that the wave of good deeds spreads, according to Nowak, is communication. It is important to disseminate information about the decisions people made in terms of cooperation. "
Experiments have already shown, for example, that more people have decided to go to the polls in an election when they have seen on Facebook that their friends have done the same thing.Similarly, in the phenomenon of the ice bucket challenge, the fact that videos became viral played a big role in the multiplication of donations.
Interventions
Francisco C. Santos and his colleagues used mathematical models to find solutions to situations where the lack of cooperation is remarkable, such as the search for an agreement to prevent climate change.
He notes that Yes, humans are inclined to cooperation, but this happens mainly in small communities When it comes to climate change, we have to cooperate with the whole world. "This is a global problem, not local, which makes it so difficult to promote cooperation in these contexts."
This is precisely the premise of a book that Jamil Zaki is expected to launch soon in the United States ( The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World or "The war for kindness: Building empathy in a broken world ", in free translation and without launching anticipation in Brazil)
According to Zaki, human beings have evolved to be socially connected and prone to socializing. ;empathy.
"Today, we live in a giant world, we are connected to thousands of people, whom we will see only once, in life, and maybe around groups that threaten us, "says Zaki
.) According to the researcher, the rules that we evolved to be empathetic were broken." We live in a time when it is much more difficult to empathize, so we see growing hatred, disconnection and isolation. "
Context seems bleak, but Zaki says it's possible to reverse the situation if we adopt strategies to form our" empathic muscle ". studies that have concluded that a variety of interventions – such as reading literary works or the use of dramatic techniques – are able to increase the degree of "drama". empathy of the participants for him, the hope of living in a world pl Cooperative is to actively engage in empathy.
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