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a social species People are very motivated to be part of a group and share a sense of identity, "says the researcher. "One way to do this is to imitate behaviors, opinions and emotions."
The influence of the environment is key
By the past, the concept of compliance has gained a bad reputation. capable of inducing individuals to engage in harmful behavior or to doubt their own judgment. In a classic experiment, the Polish psychologist Solomon Asch showed a volunteer two cards: one had a straight line and the other three straight lines of different sizes.
The participant had to identify which one had the same length of reference line. When the other participants chose the clearly wrong answer, the subject was more likely to follow the majority, going against what their own eyes saw.
Zaki, on the other hand, studies how compliance can lead to positive behaviors. In a series of experiments coordinated by him, participants who observed their colleagues donating generously to charities decided to open the wallet more than those who observed small donations.
The findings, published by Personality and Social Psychology in 2016, also showed that the impact of observing the generosity of others was not limited to copying their good deeds. The positive influence also made the participants more sympathetic to each other and more empathic in the face of adverse situations.
Scientists have also been able to map the way in which acts of cooperation can multiply in society. A study conducted by researchers at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego showed that individuals benefited from donations during a game generously passed on to other participants, who benefited from them. turn to a third group
. Acts of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, shows that initial kindness was able to reach people with up to three degrees of separation from the first benefactor
Victorious Strategy in Social Terms [19659012] The decision to cooperate with other members of society is not just an act of pure and selfless generosity. According to Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor and director of the University's Evolutionary Dynamics program, it's a winning strategy for evolution. According to the expert, cooperation – be it between humans, insects or cells – almost always happens when we expect to receive something back in the future.
Nowak offers five mechanisms that explain, in the light of evolution, why the individual decides to collaborate with each 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 because of this reputation. The third is spatial reciprocity: I help my neighbors and thus increases my chances of being helped.
The fourth is group selection, which is based on the fact that groups of "colleagues" 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 – something different, "says Nowak. "
Communication Is Essential
In addition to the experiences in which participants must decide whether or not they will help their peers 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 theoretical studies are based on
" Game theory is to use mathematics to study conflict of interest, "says Santos, for example, if a person is willing to pay a cost to provide a benefit to someone, he or she is possible to use these data to construct equations that can predict the dynamics that can occur in different scenarios.
"If we can understand underlying cooperation, this knowledge ance 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 dissemination are strong enough, for example, if the person helping the next one 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 prevail," says the researcher.
One of the essential ingredients to ensure that the wave of good actio ns 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 saw on Facebook that their friends did the same thing.In the same way, in the phenomenon of the challenge of the ice bucket, the fact that the videos became viral played a big role in the multiplication of the 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 pursuit of 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. "It's a global problem, not local, that makes it so difficult to promote cooperation in these areas. ontextes. "
This is precisely the premise of a book that Jamil Zaki will soon publish in the United States (The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, or Building empathy in a broken world, free and unpredictable translation in Brazil)
According to Zaki, humans have evolved to be socially connected and inclined to have empathy.
"Today, we live in a giant world, we are connected to thousands of people, which 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 empathic were broken." We live in a time when it is much more difficult to empathize, so we see growing hatred, disconnection and isolation. "
The 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 us cooperative is to actively exercise our empathy.
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